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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Theory for anomalous terahertz emission in striped cuprate superconductors

Pavel E. Dolgirev1,*,†, Marios H. Michael1,3,*,‡, Jonathan B. Curtis1,2, Daniele Nicoletti3, Michele Buzzi3, Michael Fechner3, Andrea Cavalleri3,4, and Eugene Demler5

  • 1Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
  • 2John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
  • 3Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, Luruper Chaussee 149, 22761 Hamburg, Germany
  • 4Clarendon Laboratory, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PU, United Kingdom
  • 5Institute for Theoretical Physics, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • †p_dolgirev@g.harvard.edu
  • ‡marios.michael@mpsd.mpg.de
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Phys. Rev. B 108, L180508 – Published 20 November, 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.108.L180508

Abstract

Recent experiments in the doped cuprates La2−xBaxCuO4 have revealed the emission of anomalous terahertz radiation after impulsive optical excitation. Here, we theoretically investigate the nonlinear electrodynamics of such striped superconductors and explore the origin of the observed radiation. We argue that photoexcitation is converted into a photocurrent by a second-order optical nonlinearity, which is activated by the breaking of inversion symmetry in certain stripe configurations. We point out the importance of including umklapp photocurrents modulated at the stripe periodicity itself, which impulsively drive surface Josephson plasmons and lead to a resonant structure of outgoing radiation, consistent with the experiments. We speculate on the utility of the proposed mechanism in the context of generating tunable terahertz radiation.

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Phys. Rev. B 108, L180508– Published 20 November, 2023
  • Received 29 May 2022
  • Revised 1 February 2023
  • Accepted 16 October 2023
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.

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