Cavity magnon-polaritons in cuprate parent compounds

Abstract

Cavity control of quantum matter may offer new ways to study and manipulate many-body systems. A particularly appealing idea is to use cavities to enhance superconductivity, especially in unconventional or high-Tc systems. Motivated by this, we propose a scheme for coupling terahertz resonators to the antiferromagnetic fluctuations in a cuprate parent compound, which are believed to provide the glue for Cooper pairs in the superconducting phase. First, we derive the interaction between magnon excitations of the Neél order and polar phonons associated with the planar oxygens. This mode also couples to the cavity electric field, and in the presence of spin-orbit interactions mediates a linear coupling between the cavity and magnons, forming hybridized magnon-polaritons. This hybridization vanishes linearly with photon momentum, implying the need for near-field optical methods, which we analyze within a simple model. We then derive a higher-order coupling between the cavity and magnons, which is only present in bilayer systems, but does not rely on spin-orbit coupling. This interaction is found to be large, but only couples to the bimagnon operator. As a result, we find a strong, but heavily damped, bimagnon-cavity interaction which produces highly asymmetric cavity line shapes in the strong-coupling regime. To conclude, we outline several interesting extensions of our theory, including applications to carrier-doped cuprates and other strongly correlated systems with terahertz-scale magnetic excitations.

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