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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen
TT 71: Ultrafast Phenomena
TT 71.2: Talk
Thursday, March 12, 2026, 09:45–10:00, HSZ/0103
Experimental signature of transient symmetry breaking in a cavity superconductor — •Siyu Duan1,2, Jingbo Wu1, Xiaoqing Jia1, Huabing Wang1, Ilya M. Eremin3, Götz S. Uhrig2, Biaobing Jin1, and Zhe Wang2 — 1Research Institute of Superconductor Electronics (RISE) & Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Devices and Systems with Extreme Performances of MOE, School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China — 2Department of Physics, TU Dortmund University, 44227 Dortmund, Germany — 3Institut für Theoretische Physik III, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 44801 Bochum, Germany
Transient states of matter far from equilibrium may exhibit physical properties beyond those allowed by the equilibrium-state crystalline symmetries. We explore ultrafast and direct electronic excitations of transient states in a cavity superconductor by using time-resolved terahertz-pump terahertz-probe spectroscopy. Our results show that the strong terahertz field can transiently modify the symmetries of the electronic subsystems via the injection of a transient supercurrent, leading to high-order nonlinear dynamical responses that are not compatible with the equilibrium-state symmetries, which evidences for transient symmetry breaking on the picosecond time scale. Our study also finds that the strong coupling of the superconductor to the designed microcavities enables the sensitive detection of the nonlinear responses associated to the transient symmetry breaking.
Keywords: transient symmetry breaking; dirty-limit superconductor; high-order nonlinear responses; terahertz-pump terahertz-probe