Snapshots of the retarded interaction of charge carriers with ultrafast fluctuations in cuprates

One of the pivotal questions in the physics of high-temperature superconductors is whether the low-energy dynamics of the charge carriers is mediated by bosons with a characteristic timescale. This issue has remained elusive as electronic correlations are expected to greatly accelerate the electron-boson scattering processes, confining them to the very femtosecond timescale that is hard to access even with state-of-the-art ultrafast techniques. Here we simultaneously push the time resolution and frequency range of transient reflectivity measurements up to an unprecedented level, enabling us to directly observe the ∼16 fs build-up of the effective electron-boson interaction in hole-doped copper oxides. This extremely fast timescale is in agreement with numerical calculations based on the t-J model and the repulsive Hubbard model, in which the relaxation of the photo-excited charges is achieved via inelastic scattering with short-range antiferromagnetic excitations.