Generalized Fresnel-Floquet equations for driven quantum materials

Abstract

Optical drives at terahertz and midinfrared frequencies in quantum materials are increasingly used to reveal the nonlinear dynamics of collective modes in correlated many-body systems and their interplay with electromagnetic waves. Recent experiments demonstrated several surprising optical properties of transient states induced by driving, including the appearance of photo-induced edges in the reflectivity in cuprate superconductors (SCs), observed both below and above the equilibrium transition temperature. Furthermore, in other driven materials, reflection coefficients larger than unity have been observed. In this paper we demonstrate that unusual optical properties of photoexcited systems can be understood from the perspective of a Floquet system, a system with periodically modulated parameters originating from pump-induced oscillations of a collective mode. These oscillations lead to an effective Floquet system with periodically modulated parameters. We present a general phenomenological model of reflectivity from Floquet materials, which takes into account parametric generation of excitation pairs. We find a universal phase diagram of drive-induced features in reflectivity which evidence a competition between driving and dissipation. To illustrate our general analysis, we apply our formalism to two concrete examples motivated by recent experiments: A single plasmon band, which describes Josephson plasmons (JPs) in layered SCs, and a phonon-polariton system, which describes upper and lower polaritons in materials such as insulating SiC. Finally, we demonstrate that our model can be used to provide an accurate fit to results of phonon-pump--terahertz-probe experiments in the high-temperature SC ${\mathrm{YBa}}_{2}{\mathrm{Cu}}_{3}{\mathrm{O}}_{6.5}$. Our model explains the appearance of a pump-induced edge, which is higher in energy than the equilibrium JP edge, even if the interlayer Josephson coupling is suppressed by the pump pulse.