Floquet engineering strongly correlated systems

Naoto Nagaosa

Victor L. Quito, Rebecca Flint

Floquet engineering is a powerful tool that drives materials with periodic light. Traditionally, the light is monochromatic, with amplitude, frequency, and polarization varied. We introduce Floquet engineering via unpolarized light built from quasimonochromatic light and show how it can modify strongly correlated systems, while preserving the original symmetries. Different types of unpolarized light can realize different strongly correlated phases As an example, we treat insulating magnetic materials on a triangular lattice and show how unpolarized light can induce a Dirac spin liquid.

Michael A. Sentef, Jiajun Li, Fabian Künzel +1 more

This paper connects the complementary limits of manipulating quantum many-body systems with classical light and quantum light. The authors describe two different pathways towards achieving Floquet engineering of matter: (i) many-photon states at weak light-matter coupling, or (ii) few-photon states at strong coupling.

Dante Marvin Kennes, Martin Claassen, Michael A. Sentef +1 more

We introduce a mechanism for light-induced Floquet engineering of the Fermi surface to dynamically tip the balance between competing instabilities in correlated condensed matter systems in the vicinity of a Van Hove singularity. We first calculate how the Fermi surface is deformed by an off-resonant, high-frequency light field and then determine the impact of this deformation on the ordering tendencies using an unbiased functional renormalization group approach. As a testbed, we investigate Floquet engineering in cuprates driven by light. We find that the $d$-wave superconducting ordering tendency in this system can be strongly enhanced over the Mott insulating one. This gives rise to extended regions of induced $d$-wave superconductivity in the effective phase diagram in the presence of a light field.

Adolfo Avella, Ferdinando Mancini