Dushko Kuzmanovski^1*, Jonathan Schmidt^2*, Nicola A. Spaldin^2*, Hendrik M. Rønnow^3*, Gabriel Aeppli^4,5,6*, Alexander V. Balatsky^7*

1 Nordita, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden

2 Department of Materials, ETH Zurich, Zurich, CH-8093, Switzerland

3 Laboratory for Quantum Magnetism, Institute of Physics, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

4 Department of Physics and Quantum Center, ETH Zurich, Zurich, CH-8093, Switzerland

5 Paul Scherrer Institut, Villigen, PSI CH-5232, Switzerland

6 Institut de Physique, EPFL, Lausanne, CH-1015, Switzerland

7 Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut 06269, USA

* Corresponding authors emails: duskokuz@gmail.com, jonathan.schmidt@mat.ethz.ch, nicola.spaldin@mat.ethz.ch, henrik.ronnow@epfl.ch, gabriel.aeppli@psi.ch, balatsky@hotmail.com

DOI10.24435/materialscloud:7k-vk [version v1]

Publication date: Feb 20, 2024

How to cite this record

Dushko Kuzmanovski, Jonathan Schmidt, Nicola A. Spaldin, Hendrik M. Rønnow, Gabriel Aeppli, Alexander V. Balatsky, Kapitza stabilization of quantum critical order, Materials Cloud Archive 2024.33 (2024), https://doi.org/10.24435/materialscloud:7k-vk

Description

Dynamical perturbations modify the states of classical systems in surprising ways and give rise to important applications in science and technology. For example, Floquet engineering exploits the possibility of band formation in the frequency domain when a strong, periodic variation is imposed on parameters such as spring constants. We describe here Kapitza engineering, where a drive field oscillating at a frequency much higher than the characteristic frequencies for the linear response of a system changes the potential energy surface so much that maxima found at equilibrium become local minima, in precise analogy to the celebrated Kapitza pendulum where the unstable inverted configuration, with the mass above rather than below the fulcrum, actually becomes stable. Our starting point is a quantum field theory of the Ginzburg-Devonshire type, suitable for many condensed matter systems, including particularly ferroelectrics and quantum paralectrics such as the common substrate (for oxide electronics) strontium titanate (STO). We show that an off-resonance oscillatory electric field generated by a laser-driven THz source can induce ferroelectric order in the quantum-critical limit. Heating effects are estimated to be manageable using pulsed radiation; "hidden" radiation-induced order can persist to low temperatures without further pumping due to stabilization by strain. We estimate the Ginzburg-Devonshire free-energy coefficients in STO using density functional theory (DFT) and the stochastic self-consistent harmonic approximation accelerated by a machine learned force field. Although we find that STO is not an optimal choice for Kapitza stabilization, we show that scanning for further candidate materials can be performed at the computationally convenient density functional theory level. We suggest second-harmonic-generation, soft-mode-spectroscopy, and X-ray-diffraction experiments to characterize the induced order. This Materials Cloud entry contains the DFT calculations, the force field and results from SSCHA calculations used in the article.

Materials Cloud sections using this data

Files

File name	Size	Description
nequip_forcefield.tar.gz MD5md5:dbc0f7d5bb61ef57b4aadc209d264173	21.0 MiB	A folder containing the nequip model used for the SSCHA simulations as well as the input config and output files of the training process.
dataframes.tar.gz MD5md5:7cdf2c5c3201006bffb52939288094aa	15.3 KiB	csv files containing dataframes with the results of the DFT, SSCHA, and force field calculations for the energy density over polarization curves.
atomate2.tar.gz MD5md5:06dfb5ff314e6a9dc3969b813cc9f758	2.3 MiB	Each json file contains a list of dictionaries that contain all information saved by the atomate2 workflow for the respective DFT/force field calculations.
sscha.tar.gz MD5md5:e3d7c5ceecc25c4de9d5f739a1e60ab5	2.7 GiB	Each directory contains the stdio SSCHA output, the last ensemble of structures and the dynamical matrix.
README MD5md5:ed42d1ba853cf3703f02261fff90064c	914 Bytes	README

License

Files and data are licensed under the terms of the following license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.
Metadata, except for email addresses, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International license.

External references

Keywords

H2020 Swissuniversities SrTiO3 SSCHA DFT Quantum critical order