Floquet vacuum engineering: Laser-driven chiral soliton lattice in the QCD vacuum

TL;DR

This paper explores how intense, high-frequency circularly polarized laser fields can induce a chiral soliton lattice in the QCD vacuum, revealing a new method of Floquet vacuum engineering with potential for novel quantum states.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework showing that periodic laser driving can create a topological soliton lattice in the QCD vacuum, a novel concept in quantum field theory.

Findings

QCD vacuum becomes unstable under strong, high-frequency laser fields

A chiral soliton lattice spontaneously forms, breaking symmetries

The work suggests new avenues for Floquet vacuum engineering

Abstract

What happens to the QCD vacuum when a time-periodic circularly polarized laser field with a sufficiently large intensity and frequency is applied? Based on the Floquet formalism for periodically driven systems and the systematic low-energy effective theory of QCD, we show that for a sufficiently large frequency and above a critical intensity, the QCD vacuum is unstable against the chiral soliton lattice of pions; a crystalline structure of topological solitons that spontaneously breaks parity and continuous translational symmetries. Our work would pave the way for novel "Floquet vacuum engineering."