24–27 Aug 2026
Paul Scherrer Institut
Europe/Zurich timezone

Floquet Engineering of Quantum Materials Beyond Idealized Conditions: A Nonequilibrium Green's Function Perspective

27 Aug 2026, 11:35
20m
Auditorium (Paul Scherrer Institut)

Auditorium

Paul Scherrer Institut

Forschungsstrasse 111 5232 Villigen PSI Switzerland
Contributed Talk

Speaker

Nils Jacobsen (Universität Bremen, MPSD Hamburg)

Description

Periodic driving of solids offers new opportunities for controlling and designing quantum phases of matter. Floquet engineering has, for example, been proposed as a route to induce topological states in graphene through circularly polarized light [1, 2] . However, the persistence of Floquet states under realistic conditions, including interactions, screening, and decoherence, remains an open question.
In this contribution, we explore extensions of the Floquet nonequilibrium Green's function formalism [3] aimed at describing driven materials beyond idealized settings. These developments enable the inclusion of electronic interactions, phonon scattering, and electromagnetic screening effects within a unified framework. The treatment of Coulomb interactions and electron--phonon coupling may, for instance, be formulated using self-energy approximations such as the second Born and Migdal approaches [4], while self-consistent coupling to Maxwell equations provides access to screening and feedback effects in driven systems [5].
Such extensions provide a foundation for assessing the realistic prospects of Floquet engineering in solids and for identifying regimes in which nonequilibrium phases may be stabilized. As a longer-term perspective, we discuss how this framework could be employed to investigate dynamical instabilities in periodically driven quantum materials [6].
[1] Oka et al. PRB 79, 081406(R) (2009)
[2] McIver et al. Nat. Phys. 16, 38–41 (2020)
[3] Tsuji et al., PRB 78 235124 (2008)
[4] Schüler et al. PRX 10 041013 (2020)
[5] Ong et al. arXiv:2504.00583 (2025)
[6] Okuwaga et al. arXiv:2601.04451 (206)

Author

Nils Jacobsen (Universität Bremen, MPSD Hamburg)

Co-authors

Dr Paul Fadler (Universität Bremen) Prof. Angel Rubio (MPSD Hamburg, Center Computational Quantum Physics, The Flatiron Institute New York) Prof. Michael Schüler (PSI Center for Scientific Computing, Theory and Data, Paul Scherrer Institute, Department of Physics, University of Fribourg) Prof. Michael Sentef (Universität Bremen, MPSD Hamburg)

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