We demonstrate how virtual scattering of laser photons inside a cavity via two-photon processes can induce controllable long-range electron interactions in two-dimensional materials. We show that laser light that is red (blue) detuned from the cavity yields attractive (repulsive) interactions whose strength is proportional to the laser intensity. Furthermore, we find that the interactions are not screened effectively except at very low frequencies. For realistic cavity parameters, laser-induced heating of the electrons by inelastic photon scattering is suppressed and coherent electron interactions dominate. When the interactions are attractive, they cause an instability in the Cooper channel at a temperature proportional to the square root of the driving intensity. Our results provide a novel route for engineering electron interactions in a wide range of two-dimensional materials including AB-stacked bilayer graphene and the conducting interface between LaAlO 3 and SrTiO 3 .

In triangular lattice structures, spatial anisotropy and frustration can lead to rich equilibrium phase diagrams with regions containing complex, highly entangled states of matter. In this work, we study the driven two-rung triangular Hubbard model and evolve these states out of equilibrium, observing how the interplay between the driving and the initial state unexpectedly shuts down the particle-hole excitation pathway. This restriction, which symmetry arguments fail to predict, dictates the transient dynamics of the system, causing the available particle-hole degrees of freedom to manifest uniform long-range order. We discuss implications of our results for a recent experiment on photoinduced superconductivity in κ − ðBEDT − TTFÞ 2 Cu½NðCNÞ 2 Br molecules.

Spin-charge separation (SCS) is a striking manifestation of strong correlations in low-dimensional quantum systems, whereby a fermion splits into separate spin and charge excitations that travel at different speeds. Here, we demonstrate that periodic driving enables control over SCS in a Hubbard system near half filling. In one dimension, we predict analytically an exotic regime where charge travels slower than spin and can even become "frozen," in agreement with numerical calculations. In two dimensions, the driving slows both charge and spin and leads to complex interferences between single-particle and pair-hopping processes.

We propose using ultracold fermionic atoms trapped in a periodically shaken optical lattice as a quantum simulator of the t-J Hamiltonian, which describes the dynamics in doped antiferromagnets and is thought to be relevant to the problem of high-temperature superconductivity in the cuprates. We show analytically that the effective Hamiltonian describing this system for off-resonant driving is the t-J model with additional pair hopping terms, whose parameters can all be controlled by the drive. We then demonstrate numerically using tensor network methods for a one-dimensional (1D) lattice that a slow modification of the driving strength allows near-adiabatic transfer of the system from the ground state of the underlying Hubbard model to the ground state of the effective t-J Hamiltonian. Finally, we report exact diagonalization calculations illustrating the control achievable on the dynamics of spin-singlet pairs in 2D lattices utilizing this technique with current cold-atom quantum-simulation technology. These results open new routes to explore the interplay between density and spin in strongly correlated fermionic systems through their out-of-equilibrium dynamics.

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