LIGHT-INDUCED DYNAMICS AND CONTROL OF STRONGLY CORRELATED MATERIALS

Strongly correlated materials with various coupled degrees of freedom exhibit intriguing quantum phases such as Mott insulators or high-Tc superconductivity. However, these equilibrium phases only reflect a fraction of the entire complex energy landscape. The recent development of intense lasers has enabled us to induce and probe their far-fromequilibrium dynamics. This can be utilized to explore the previously hidden regions of the energy landscape and navigate a system into a metastable state. Such optical manipulation is now opening up the field of ?nonequilibrium material science. Following the experimental advances, extensive theoretical investigation is in progress, which is a challenging task because of the many-body nature of the problem. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the topic and discuss two examples where optical excitation leads to genuine nonequilibrium responses in correlated materials: (i) enhanced Josephson tunneling in high-Tc superconductors via parametric driving and (ii) optically induced quantum phase transitions in an organic crystal. In both cases, I will explain how the nonequilibrium states are characterized in simulations and relate the findings to the pump-probe experiments.