Electronic Floquet gyro-liquid crystal
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.
Additional Information
© The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received 18 August 2020; Accepted 04 August 2021; Published 06 September 2021. We would like to thank Ehud Altman, Vladimir Kalnizky, Gil Refael, and Ari Turner for illuminating discussions and David Cohen and Yan Katz for technical support. N.L. acknowledges support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement No. 639172), and from the Israeli Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE) "Circle of Light". M.R. gratefully acknowledges the support of the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement No. 678862) and the Villum Foundation. M.R. and E.B. acknowledge support from CRC 183 of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. G.K.G. acknowledges support from Israel Council for Higher Education. Data availability: The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Code availability: The code that supports the findings of this study is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Author Contributions: I.E. and G.K.G. performed the numerical and analytical calculations. I.E., G.K.G., E.B., M.R. and N.L. analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript. The authors declare no competing interests. Peer review information: Nature Communications thanks Tigran Sedrakyan and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.Attached Files
Published - s41467-021-25511-9.pdf
Submitted - 2007.07909.pdf
Supplemental Material - 41467_2021_25511_MOESM1_ESM.pdf
Supplemental Material - 41467_2021_25511_MOESM2_ESM.pdf
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Additional details
- Alternative title
- Electronic Floquet Liquid Crystals
- Eprint ID
- 110793
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20210909-175530413
- 639172
- European Research Council (ERC)
- Israeli Center of Research Excellence
- 678862
- European Research Council (ERC)
- Villum Foundation
- CRC 183
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
- Council for Higher Education (Israel)
- Created
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2021-09-09Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-09-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field