Floquet vacuum engineering: Laser-driven chiral soliton lattice in the QCD vacuum
arXiv:2107.07074 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.104.054041
Abstract
What happens to the QCD vacuum when a time-periodic circularly polarized laser field with a sufficiently large intensity and frequency is applied? Based on the Floquet formalism for periodically driven systems and the systematic low-energy effective theory of QCD, we show that for a sufficiently large frequency and above a critical intensity, the QCD vacuum is unstable against the chiral soliton lattice of pions; a crystalline structure of topological solitons that spontaneously breaks parity and continuous translational symmetries. Our work would pave the way for novel "Floquet vacuum engineering."
7 pages; v2: added discussion of Weyl/Dirac semimetals, typos fixed, published version
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