Selective Transient Cooling by Impulse Perturbations in a Simple Toy Model

Light-induced evaporative cooling of holes in the Hubbard model

An elusive goal in the field of driven quantum matter is the induction of long-range order. Here, we propose a mechanism based on light-induced evaporative cooling of holes in a correlated fermionic system. Since the entropy of a filled narrow band grows rapidly with hole doping, the isentropic transfer of holes from a doped Mott insulator to such a band results in a drop of temperature. Strongly correlated Fermi liquids and symmetry-broken states could thus be produced by dipolar excitations. Using nonequilibrium dynamical mean field theory, we show that suitably designed chirped pulses may realize this cooling effect. In particular, we demonstrate the emergence of antiferromagnetic order in a system which is initially in a weakly correlated state above the maximum Néel temperature. Our work suggests a general strategy for inducing strong correlation phenomena in periodically modulated atomic gases in optical lattices or light-driven materials.

Driven quantum many-body systems can host finite densities of quasiparticles with the potential to realise emergent behaviour that is distinct from the equilibrium state. Werner et al. propose a method to cool holes in a correlated system so that more exotic low-entropy phases can be reached.