Photo-induced superconductivity in the Kondo lattice

The non-equilibrium dynamics can induce many interesting phenomena in strongly correlated quantum systems. For example, recent experiments have observed the photoinduced superconducting-like behavior in some of the high-T_c cuprates and the alkali-doped fullerenes even above T_c. In this context, we have previously studied theoretically the photo-excited states from the Mott insulating state in the Hubbard model and found that the pulse irradiation can induce the enhancement of superconducting correlations, which is attributed to eta-pairing formation [1]. Here, we show that the same mechanism can be applied to the Kondo lattice model, an effective model for heavy fermion systems, by demonstrating that the photo-irradiation indeed enhances the eta-pairing correlations. As in the Hubbard model, the non-linear optical process is essential to increase the number of photo-induced eta-pairs and thus enhance the superconducting correlations.
[1] T. Kaneko, T. Shirakawa, S. Sorella, and S. Yunoki, Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 077002 (2019).