Tutorial. Trajectories through emergent metastable states ‌in 2D correlated electron systems

D. Mihailovic1,2,3

1Department of Complex Matter, Jozef Stefan Institute, Jamova 39, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

2Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, University of Ljubljana, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

3CENN Nanocenter, Jamova 39, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

Non-equilibrium states of matter have become of great fundamental and practical interest in recent years because of their wide importance in diverse areas of physics. With the rapid development of new time-resolved techniques, the temporal dynamics of competing processes and interactions were recently elucidated in a wide variety of complex condensed matter systems. However, the physics of metastable mesoscopically non-periodic quantum textures emerging from phase transitions has been largely experimentally inaccessible till now: current state of the art time-resolved methods using x-rays, electron diffraction, photoemission, THz and optical spectroscopy all average over multiple transition outcomes. Moreover, they cannot resolve irregular nonperiodic nanoscale structures, but some progress has been made in the use of scanning tunneling microscopy. Here I will outline experimental and theoretical progress in the study of emergent phenomena in metastable states, concentrating on well-known systems that offer insights into complex physics of multicomponent non-equilibrium electronic systems, such as charge fractionalization, jamming and topologically arrested kinetics.