- Shen, L
- Mack, SA
- Dakovski, G
- Coslovich, G
- Krupin, O
- Hoffmann, M
- Huang, SW
- Chuang, YD
- Johnson, JA
- Lieu, S
- Zohar, S
- Ford, C
- Kozina, M
- Schlotter, W
- Minitti, MP
- Fujioka, J
- Moore, R
- Lee, WS
- Hussain, Z
- Tokura, Y
- Littlewood, P
- Turner, JJ
- et al.
© 2020 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. In the mixed-valence manganites, a near-infrared laser typically melts the orbital and spin order simultaneously, corresponding to the photoinduced d1d0→d0d1 excitations in the Mott-Hubbard bands of manganese. Here, we use ultrafast methods-both femtosecond resonant X-ray diffraction and optical reflectivity-to demonstrate that the orbital response in the layered manganite Nd1-xSr1+xMnO4(x=2/3) does not follow this scheme. At the photoexcitation saturation fluence, the orbital order is only diminished by a few percent in the transient state. Instead of the typical d1d0→d0d1 transition, a near-infrared pump in this compound promotes a fundamentally distinct mechanism of charge transfer, the d0→d1L, where L denotes a hole in the oxygen band. This finding may pave a different avenue for selectively manipulating specific types of order in complex materials of this class.