Long after its discovery superconductivity in alkali fullerides A3C60 still challenges conventional wisdom. The freshest inroad in such ever-surprising physics is the behaviour under intense infrared (IR) excitation. Signatures attributable to a transient superconducting state extending up to temperatures ten times higher than the equilibrium Tc∼ 20 K have been discovered in K3C60 after ultra-short pulsed IR irradiation -- an effect which still appears as remarkable as mysterious. Motivated by the observation that the phenomenon is observed in a broad pumping frequency range that coincides with the mid-infrared electronic absorption peak still of unclear origin, rather than to TO phonons as has been proposed, we advance here a radically new mechanism. First, we argue that this broad absorption peak represents a "super-exciton" involving the promotion of one electron from the t1u half-filled state to a higher-energy empty t1g state, dramatically lowered in energy by the large dipole-dipole interaction acting in conjunction with Jahn Teller effect within the enormously degenerate manifold of (t1u)2(t1g)1 states. Both long-lived and entropy-rich because they are triplets, the IR-induced excitons act as a sort of cooling mechanism that permits transient superconductive signals to persist up to much larger temperatures.
@article{arxiv.1704.05613,
title = {Cooling quasiparticles in A$_3$C$_{60}$ fullerides by excitonic mid-infrared absorption},
author = {Andrea Nava and Claudio Giannetti and Antoine Georges and Erio Tosatti and Michele Fabrizio},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.05613},
year = {2017}
}