A puzzling phenomenon has been recently revealed in terahertz nonlinear optical response experiments: A third harmonic generation (THG) signal, identified only in the superconducting (SC) phase in a conventional BCS superconductor, is found to persist into a wide pseudogap regime in the underdoped cuprate, accompanied by a $\pi$ phase shift in the THG signal across the SC transition. In this paper, we offer a consistent understanding of such an unconventional phenomenon based on an emergent Higgs mode of the condensed holons in the doped Mott insulator. Specifically, in the lower pseudogap phase (LPP), where, although the holons still remain Bose-condensed, the SC phase coherence gets disordered by excited spinons, which induce vortexlike responses from the holon condensate. By coupling to such internal fluctuations described by a mutual Chern-Simons gauge theory, we show that an external electromagnetic field can indeed produce the optical THG response in both the SC and LPP states, which are distinguished by a $\pi$ phase shift with a substantial suppression of the THG signal in the latter regime at higher temperatures.

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• Fractionalization
• Holon
• Spinon
• Superconducting fluctuations
• Vortices in superconductors
• High-temperature superconductors
• Strongly correlated systems
• High-harmonic generation
• Landau-Ginzburg theory