Dynamical Time-Reversal Symmetry Breaking and Photo-Induced Chiral Spin Liquid in Frustrated Mott Insulators

Spurred by recent progress in melting, enhancement and induction of electronic order out of equilibrium, a tantalizing prospect concerns instead accessing transient Floquet steady states via broad pump pulses, to manipulate band topology and affect electronic transport. Here, we extend these ideas to strongly-correlated systems and show that pumping frustrated Mott insulators with circularly-polarized light can drive the effective spin system across a phase transition to a chiral spin liquid (CSL). Starting from a Kagome Hubbard model deep in the Mott phase, circular polarization promotes a scalar spin chirality $\mathbf{S}_i \cdot (\mathbf{S}_j \times \mathbf{S}_k)$ term directly to the Hamiltonian level, dynamically breaking time-reversal while preserving SU(2) spin symmetry. We find that the transient physics is well-captured by an effective Floquet spin model, fingerprint its phase diagram, and find a stable photo-induced CSL in close proximity to the equilibrium state. The results presented suggest a new avenue of employing dynamical symmetry breaking to engineer quantum spin liquids and access elusive phase transitions that are not readily accessible in equilibrium.