Photoinduced conductivity dynamics studies of MgB₂ thin films

We present the first direct studies of photoinduced Cooper-pair breaking and subsequent superconducting state recovery dynamics by means of femtosecond time-resolved optical-pump terahertz probe spectroscopy focusing on the superconducting state recovery dynamics in MgB₂. The superconducting state recovery proceeds on the timescale of several hundred picoseconds and shows a strong temperature dependence. In particular, upon increasing the temperature the recovery time first decreases, reaches a minimum, followed by a quasi-divergence upon further increasing the temperature towards T_c. Moreover, the recovery time shows virtually no intensity dependence, even though the photoexcitation fluence is changed by over an order of magnitude. This suggests that pair recovery is goverend by a phonon-bottleneck mechanism, where the lifetime of high energy phonons (Planck constant over two piw > 2Δ) is governed by their anharmonicity.