Abstract
Floquet engineering uses coherent time-periodic drives to realize designer band structures on-demand, thus yielding a versatile approach for inducing a wide range of exotic quantum many-body phenomena. Here we show how this approach can be used to induce non-equilibrium correlated states with spontaneously broken symmetry in lightly doped semiconductors. In the presence of a resonant driving field, the system spontaneously develops quantum liquid crystalline order featuring strong anisotropy whose directionality rotates as a function of time. The phase transition occurs in the steady state of the system achieved due to the interplay between the coherent external drive, electron-electron interactions, and dissipative processes arising from the coupling to phonons and the electromagnetic environment. We obtain the phase diagram of the system using numerical calculations that match predictions obtained from a phenomenological treatment and discuss the conditions on the system and the external drive under which spontaneous symmetry breaking occurs. Our results demonstrate that coherent driving can be used to induce non-equilibrium quantum phases of matter with dynamical broken symmetry.
Highlights
Floquet engineering uses coherent time-periodic drives to realize designer band structures on-demand, yielding a versatile approach for inducing a wide range of exotic quantum many-body phenomena
Since the concept of a ground state does not apply to driven quantum systems, it is an interesting question whether an analogous mechanism can lead to strongly correlated nonequilibrium phases
As we show in detail below, under appropriate conditions on the material’s band structure and the form of the drive, the co-rotating part of the drive opens a “Floquet gap” all the way around the resonance ring
Summary
Floquet engineering uses coherent time-periodic drives to realize designer band structures on-demand, yielding a versatile approach for inducing a wide range of exotic quantum many-body phenomena. In materials with band structures that feature large densities of states (DOSs), the kinetic energy costs that oppose the formation of correlations are small Such materials, provide a rich platform for realizing exotic phases of matter where interparticle interactions crucially alter the ground-state properties of the system. Two-dimensional systems in which the minimum of the singleparticle dispersion occurs along a ring in momentum space (rather than at a single point, as for a standard parabolic dispersion), provide an alternative route for achieving large DOSs and exotic correlated phases[32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45] This occurs, for example, in two-dimensional materials with strong Rashba-type spin-orbit coupling[46,47]. For short-ranged interactions, electronic liquidcrystalline ground states were predicted in ref
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