Photoinduced Prethermalization Phenomena in Correlated Metals

Abstract

Prethermalization phenomena in weakly interacting Hubbard systems after electric‐field pump pulses with a finite duration are studied. The Hubbard interaction U is taken into account up to second order, by applying the prethermalization paradigm for time‐dependent interaction protocols, and the electric field strength beyond linear order. A scaling behavior with pulse duration is observed for the absorbed energy as well as individual prethermalized momentum occupation numbers, which are attributed to the leading quadratic orders in interaction and electric field. It is shown that a pronounced nonthermal momentum distribution can be created with pump pulses of suitable resonance frequencies, and how to distinguish them from thermal states is discussed.

Photoinduced prethermal order parameter dynamics in the two-dimensional large-$N$ Hubbard-Heisenberg model

“…4). Hence, we center the pulse at t 0 = 250t −1 hop in (18) such that it is only active after the warm-up dynamics evolved the system into a stationary state. For every parameter set we average over at least 200 trajectories and check whether at late times there is still a notable spread among the observables of the trajectories.…”

“…Before thermalization, quantum systems can dephase into prethermal states with long lifetimes [15][16][17], which are characterized by the existence of additional conserved quantities. The prethermalization dynamics depends on the specifics of the driving [18] and offers -if sufficiently understood -a way to manipulate ordered phases in a material or even to induce order that is not accessible in equilibrium. In this sense prethermal order is particularly interesting because -unlike thermal states -it does not only depend on the total amount of absorbed energy.…”