Redistribution of phase fluctuations in a periodically driven cuprate superconductor

Abstract

We study the thermally fluctuating state of a bi-layer cuprate superconductor under the periodic action of a staggered field oscillating at optical frequencies. This analysis distills essential elements of the recently discovered phenomenon of light enhanced coherence in YBa${}_2$Cu${}_3$O${}_{6+x}$, which was achieved by periodically driving infrared active apical oxygen distortions. The effect of a staggered periodic perturbation is studied using a Langevin and Fokker-Planck description of driven, coupled Josephson junctions, which represent two neighboring pairs of layers and their two plasmons. In a toy model including only two junctions, we demonstrate that the external driving leads to a suppression of phase fluctuations of the low-energy plasmon, an effect which is amplified via the resonance of the high energy plasmon. When extending the modeling to the full layers, we find that this reduction becomes far more pronounced, with a striking suppression of the low-energy fluctuations, as visible in the power spectrum. We also find that this effect acts onto the in-plane fluctuations, which are reduced on long length scales. All these findings provide a physical framework to describe light control in cuprates.

References in corpus (2)

• Disentangling the electronic and phononic glue in a high-Tc superconductor
• Doping dependence of the vortex-core energy in bilayer films of cuprates

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Nonlinear light-matter interaction at terahertz frequencies
• Nonequilibrium enhancement of high-temperature superconductivity in a 3D model of cuprates
• Coherent Modulation of the YBa2Cu3O6+x Atomic Structure by Displacive Stimulated Ionic Raman Scattering
• Dynamical decoherence of the light induced interlayer coupling in YBa${}_2$Cu${}_3$O${}_{6+\delta }$
• Transiently enhanced interlayer tunneling in optically driven high $T_c$ superconductors
• Terahertz field control of interlayer transport modes in cuprate superconductors
• Optical melting of the transverse Josephson plasmon: a comparison between bilayer and trilayer cuprates