Pressure-Dependent Relaxation in the Photoexcited Mott Insulator ET-F₂ TCNQ: Influence of Hopping and Correlations on Quasiparticle Recombination Rates

We measure the ultrafast recombination of photoexcited quasiparticles (holon-doublon pairs) in the one dimensional Mott insulator ET-F2 TCNQ as a function of external pressure, which is used to tune the electronic structure. At each pressure value, we first fit the static optical properties and extract the electronic bandwidth t and the intersite correlation energy V. We then measure the recombination times as a function of pressure, and we correlate them with the corresponding microscopic parameters. We find that the recombination times scale differently than for metals and semiconductors. A fit to our data based on the time-dependent extended Hubbard Hamiltonian suggests that the competition between local recombination and delocalization of the Mott-Hubbard exciton dictates the efficiency of the recombination