Melting of magnetic order in NaOsO3 by femtosecond laser pulses

NaOsO3 has recently attracted significant attention for the strong coupling between its electronic band structure and magnetic ordering. Here, we used time-resolved magnetic x-ray diffraction to determine the timescale of the photoinduced antiferromagnetic dynamics in NaOsO3. Our measurements are consistent with a sub-100 fs melting of the antiferromagnetic long-range order that occurs significantly faster than the lattice dynamics as monitored by the transient change in intensity of selected Bragg structural reflections, which instead show a decrease of intensity on a timescale of several ps.