There were a number of papers in the past month or so on Metal-Insulator transition in vanadium dioxide. The first work is the near-scanning infrared microscopy measurements done by Mumtaz Qazilbash et al. from Basov group at UCSD published last week in Science revealing nucleation and growth of metallic domains in vanadium dioxide films with nanoscale resolution.
Last month there was another Science paper by Peter Baum et al. from Zewail group at Caltech looking at “4D” visualization of metal-insulator transition in vanadium dioxide – involving a combination of 3D observations of Bragg peaks with electron diffraction, resolved on the femtosecond scale.
Also see this PNAS article by Baum and Zewail (PNAS | November 20, 2007 | vol. 104 | no. 47 | 18409-18414, Open access), as well as a Science perspective by Cavalleri.
Baum et al., Science 318 (5851), 788. [DOI: 10.1126/science.1147724]
And in September, there was a PRL by Kubler et al. on light-induced femtosecond MIT transition in VO2, followed by another PRL by Hilton et al. in late November on a similar topic.
