Cavity magnon-polaritons in a cuprate parent compound

MPSD Seminar

  • Date: Sep 7, 2021
  • Time: 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Jonathan Curtis
  • Narang/Demler groups, Harvard University
  • Location: SR I/II/III and online via Zoom
  • Host: Andrea Cavalleri
Cavity magnon-polaritons in a cuprate parent compound

Cavity control of quantum matter may offer new ways to study and manipulate many-body systems. A particularly appealing idea is to use cavities to enhance superconductivity, especially in unconventional or high- Tc systems. Motivated by this, we propose a scheme for coupling Terahertz resonators to the antiferromagnetic fluctuations in a cuprate parent compound, which are believed to provide the glue for Cooper pairs in the superconducting phase. First, we derive the interaction between magnon excitations of the Neél-order and polar phonons associated with the planar oxygens. This mode also couples to the cavity electric field, and in the presence of spin-orbit interactions mediates a linear coupling between the cavity and magnons, forming hybridized magnon-polaritons. This hybridization vanishes linearly with photon momentum, implying the need for near-field optical methods, which we analyze within a simple model. We then derive a higher-order coupling between the cavity and magnons which is only present in bilayer systems, but does not rely on spin-orbit coupling. This interaction is found to be large, but only couples to the bimagnon operator. As a result we find a strong, but heavily damped, bimagnon-cavity interaction which produces highly asymmetric cavity line-shapes in the strong-coupling regime. To conclude, we outline several interesting extensions of our theory, including applications to carrier-doped cuprates and other strongly-correlated systems with Terahertz-scale magnetic excitations.

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