The pathway to light-induced superconductivity

Over the past decade, the condensed matter community has been consumed by the possibility of intense light creating superconductivity at room temperature. The excitement has been mainly driven by advances in pump and probe experiments, where pumping materials such as K3C60 and kappa-salts of the family κ-(ET)2-X by strong Mid-IR laser light has shown optical signatures consistent with a long-lived and a short-lived superconductivng state respectively. In this talk, I will present a microscopic mechanism based on light coupled to electronic band transitions as the most natural way to achieve photo-induced superconductivity. I will comment how such a microscopic model can be used to derive other mechanisms proposed in the literature. The success of the multi-band photo-induced superconductivity mechanism lies in explaining resonant features in current experiments not present in previous models. Finally, we take advantage of the resonances inherent in the microscopic model, to propose new photo-induced superconductors made up of 2D materials placed on substrates that can support surface plasma modes as a new avenue to deliberately engineer high-temperature photo-induced superconductivity.