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There is currently great interest in the strong coupling between the quantized photon field of a cavity and electronic or other degrees of freedom in materials. A major goal is the creation of novel collective states entangling photons with those degrees of freedom. Here we show that the cooperative effect between strong electron correlations in quantum materials and the long-range interactions induced by the photon field leads to the stabilization of coherent phases of light and matter. By studying a two-band model of interacting electrons coupled to a cavity field, we show that a phase characterized by the simultaneous condensation of excitons and photon superradiance can be realized, hence stabilizing and intertwining two collective phenomena which are rather elusive in the absence of this cooperative effect.

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We investigate the formation of non-equilibrium superconducting states in driven alkali-doped fullerides A3C60. Within a minimal three-orbital model for the superconductivity of these materials, it was recently demonstrated theoretically that an orbital-dependent imbalance of the interactions leads to an enhancement of superconductivity at equilibrium [M. Kim et al. Phys. Rev. B 94, 155152 (2016)]. We investigate the dynamical response to a time periodic modulation of this interaction imbalance, and show that it leads to the formation of a transient superconducting state which survives much beyond the equilibrium critical temperature Tc. For a specific range of frequencies, we find that the driving reduces superconductivity when applied to a superconducting state below Tc, while still inducing a superconducting state when the initial temperature is larger than Tc. These findings reinforce the relevance of the interaction-imbalance mechanism as a possible explanation of the recent experimental observation of light-induced superconductivity in alkali-doped fullerenes. arXiv:1702.04675v2 [cond-mat.supr-con]

Mott insulators are "unsuccessful metals" in which Coulomb repulsion prevents charge conduction despite a metal-like concentration of conduction electrons. The possibility to unlock the frozen carriers with an electric field offers tantalizing prospects of realizing new Mott-based microelectronic devices. Here we unveil how such unlocking happens in a simple model that shows coexistence of a stable Mott insulator and a metastable metal. Considering a slab subject to a linear potential drop we find, by means of Dynamical Mean-Field Theory that the electric breakdown of the Mott insulator occurs via a first-order insulator-to-metal transition characterized by an abrupt gap-collapse in sharp contrast to the standard Zener breakdown. The switch-on of conduction is due to the field-driven stabilization of the metastable metallic phase. Outside the region of insulator-metal coexistence, the electric breakdown occurs through a more conventional quantum tunneling across the Hubbard bands tilted by the field. Our findings rationalize recent experimental observations and may offer a guideline for future technological research.

Many body models undergoing a quantum phase transition to a broken-symmetry phase that survives up to a critical temperature must possess, in the ordered phase, symmetric as well as non-symmetric eigenstates. We predict, and explicitly show in the fully-connected Ising model in a transverse field, that these two classes of eigenstates do not overlap in energy, and therefore that an energy edge exists separating low-energy symmetry-breaking eigenstates from high-energy symmetry-invariant ones. This energy is actually responsible, as we show, for the dynamical phase transition displayed by this model under a sudden large increase of the transverse field. A second situation we consider is the opposite, where the symmetry-breaking eigenstates are those in the high-energy sector of the spectrum, whereas the low-energy eigenstates are symmetric. In that case too a special energy must exist marking the boundary and leading to unexpected out-ofequilibrium dynamical behavior. An example is the fermonic repulsive Hubbard model Hamiltonian H. Exploiting the trivial fact that the high energy spectrum of H is also the low energy one of −H, we conclude that the high energy eigenstates of the Hubbard model are superfluid. Simulating in a time-dependent Gutzwiller approximation the time evolution of a high energy BCS-like trial wave function, we show that a small superconducting order parameter will actually grow in spite of the repulsive nature of interaction.

We investigate by means of the time-dependent Gutzwiller approximation the transport properties of a strongly-correlated slab subject to Hubbard repulsion and connected with to two metallic leads kept at a different electrochemical potential. We focus on the real-time evolution of the electronic properties after the slab is connected to the leads and consider both metallic and Mott insulating slabs. When the correlated slab is metallic, the system relaxes to a steady-state that sustains a finite current. The zero-bias conductance is finite and independent of the degree of correlations within the slab as long as the system remains metallic. On the other hand, when the slab is in a Mott insulating state, the external bias leads to currents that are exponentially activated by charge tunneling across the Mott-Hubbard gap, consistent with the Landau-Zener dielectric breakdown scenario.Comment: 18 pages, 17 figure

In high temperature superconductors we provide evidence of spin and mixed phonon-charge collective modes as mediators of the effective electron-electron interaction and suggestive of a charge and spin density wave instability competing with superconductivity. Indeed, we show that the so-called kinks and waterfalls observed in angle-resolved photoemission spectra of La 2−x Sr x CuO 4 , a prototypical high-T c superconducting cuprate, are due to the coupling of quasiparticles with two distinct nearly critical collective modes with finite characteristic wave vectors, typical of charge and spin fluctuations. The simultaneous presence of these two modes reconciles the long standing dichotomy whether kinks are due to phonons or spin waves.