Capturing photoinduced structural distortion within a unit cell of BiFeO$_3$

The interaction of light with correlated materials has been an intensely studied research forefront in which the coupling of radiation energy to selective degrees of freedom offers a novel contact-free control knob to tune functionalities on ultrafast time scales. We studied a photoexcited multiferroic BiFeO$_3$ thin film using time-resolved x-ray absorption spectroscopy aided by density functional theory calculations. The study revealed a uniaxial deformation of the unit cell at a constant volume with a minimal oxygen octahedron rotation, consistent with the influence of photoinduced carriers to the ferroelectric polarization. These important findings illustrate a microscopic picture of local structural reconfiguration around iron atoms at atomistic length scales during a photocarrier-mediated nonequilibrium process in polar materials.