UC Berkeley

In nodal-line semimetals, linearly dispersing states form Dirac loops in the reciprocal space with a high degree of electron-hole symmetry and a reduced density of states near the Fermi level. The result is reduced electronic screening and enhanced correlations between Dirac quasiparticles. Here we investigate the electronic structure of ZrSiSe, by combining time- and angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy with ab initio density functional theory (DFT) complemented by an extended Hubbard model (DFT+U+V) and by time-dependent DFT+U+V. We show that electronic correlations are reduced on an ultrashort timescale by optical excitation of high-energy electrons-hole pairs, which transiently screen the Coulomb interaction. Our findings demonstrate an all-optical method for engineering the band structure of a quantum material.