Optical absorption properties of laser-dressed matter

Abstract

Characterizing and controlling matter driven far from equilibrium represents a major challenge for science and technology. Here we develop a theory for the optical absorption of electronic materials driven far from equilibrium by resonant and non-resonant lasers. In it, the interaction between matter and the driving light is treated exactly through a Floquet analysis, while the effects of the probing light are captured to first order in perturbation theory. The resulting equations are reminiscent to those for equilibrium absorption but with the Floquet modes playing the role of the pristine eigenstates. The formalism is employed to characterize the optical properties of a model nanoscale semiconductor dressed by non-resonant light of intermediate intensity (non-perturbative, but non-ionizing). As shown, non-resonant light can reversibly turn this transparent semiconductor into a broadband absorber and open strong absorption/stimulated emission bands at very low frequencies (~ meV). Further, the absorption spectra of the driven material exhibit periodic features energetically spaced by the photon energy of the driving light that reflect the periodic structure of the Floquet bands. These developments offer a general approach to understand and predict the emergent optical properties of materials dressed by the electric field of light, and catalyze the design of laser-dressed materials with desired optical properties.

arXiv comment17 pages, 8 figures

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• Driven quantum transport on the nanoscale
• Excitonic Dynamical Franz-Keldysh Effect
• Loschmidt Echo
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Cited by in corpus (13)

• Giant modulation of optical nonlinearity by Floquet engineering
• Dynamical symmetries of periodically-driven quantum systems and their spectroscopic signatures
• Selection rules in symmetry-broken systems by symmetries in synthetic dimensions
• Optical properties of periodically-driven open nonequilibrium quantum systems
• Rovibronic spectra of molecules dressed by light fields
• Unified Light-Matter Floquet Theory and its Application to Quantum Communication
• Optical Activity from the Exciton Aharonov-Bohm Effect: A Floquet Engineering Approach
• Floquet theory and computational method for the optical absorption of laser-dressed solids
• Stark Control of Electrons Across the Molecule-Semiconductor Interface
• Dynamical nonlinear optical response in time-periodic quantum systems
• First-principle based Floquet engineering of solids in the velocity gauge
• Robust purely optical signatures of Floquet states in laser-dressed crystals
• Non-Hermitian Floquet dynamics in absorption spectroscopy