Redistribution of phase fluctuations in a periodically driven cuprate superconductor

Abstract

We study the thermally fluctuating state of a bilayer cuprate superconductor under the periodic action of a staggered field oscillating at optical frequencies. This analysis distills essential elements of the recently discovered phenomenon of light-enhanced coherence in YBa2Cu3O6+x, which was achieved by periodically driving infrared active apical oxygen distortions. The effect of a staggered periodic perturbation is studied using a Langevin and Fokker-Planck description of driven, coupled Josephson junctions, which represent two neighboring pairs of layers and their two plasmons. In a toy model including only two junctions, we demonstrate that the external driving leads to a suppression of phase fluctuations of the low-energy plasmon, an effect which is amplified via the resonance of the high-energy plasmon. When extending the modeling to the full layers, we find that this reduction becomes far more pronounced, with a striking suppression of the low-energy fluctuations, as visible in the power spectrum. We also find that this effect acts on the in-plane fluctuations, which are reduced on long length scales. All these findings provide a physical framework to describe light control in cuprates.