Floquet engineering of many-body states by the Ponderomotive potential

The Ponderomotive force is a static second order force that a particle feels in an oscillating field. The effective potential for this force may be called the Ponderomotive potential. We generalize this notion to degrees of freedom in periodically driven quantum many-body systems, and propose it as a convenient tool to engineer the non-equilibrium steady states beyond the single particle level. Applied to materials driven by light, the Ponderomotive potential is intimately related to the optical conductivity, which experiences enhancements close to resonances. We show that the Ponderomotive potential from incident light may be used to induce excitonic condensates in semiconductors, to generate attractive interactions leading to superconductivity in certain electron-phonon systems, and to create additional free energy minima in systems with charge/spin/excitonic orders. These effects are discussed for specific materials such that they can be readily verified in ultrafast experiments.