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Free keywords:
Condensed Matter, Superconductivity, cond-mat.supr-con, Condensed Matter, Materials Science, cond-mat.mtrl-sci,physics.app-ph, Physics, Computational Physics, physics.comp-ph
Abstract:
Strong laser pulses can control superconductivity, inducing non-equilibrium transient pairing by leveraging strong-light matter interaction. Here we demonstrate theoretically that equilibrium ground-state phonon-mediated superconductive pairing can be affected through the vacuum fluctuating electromagnetic field in a cavity. Using the recently developed ab initio quantum electrodynamical density-functional theory approximation, we specifically investigate the phonon-mediated superconductive behavior of MgB2 under different cavity setups and find that in the strong-light matter coupling regime its superconducting transition temperature can be enhanced by ≈73% (≈40%) in an in-plane (out-of-plane) polarized cavity. The results highlight that strong-light matter coupling in extended systems can profoundly alter material properties in a non-perturbative way by modifying their electronic structure and phononic dispersion at the same time. Our findings indicate a pathway to the experimental realization of light-controlled superconductivity in solid-state materials at equilibrium via cavity-material engineering.
