Observation of Superconducting Solitons by Terahertz-Light-Driven Persistent Pseudo-Spin Coherence
Abstract
Overcoming the decoherence bottleneck remains a central challenge for advancing coherent superconducting quantum device and information technologies. Solitons -- non-dispersive wave packets stabilized by the collective synchronization of quantum excitations -- offer a robust pathway to mitigating dephasing, yet their realization in superconductors has remained experimentally elusive. Here, we report the observation of a driven soliton state in epitaxial thin films of an iron-based superconductor (Co-doped BaFeAs), induced by intense, multi-cycle terahertz (THz) periodic driving. The dynamical transition to this soliton state is marked by the emergence of Floquet-like spectral sidebands that exhibit a strongly nonlinear dependence on THz laser field strength and a resonant enhancement with temperature. Quantum kinetic simulations corroborate these observations, allowing us to underpin the emergence of synchronized Anderson pseudo-spin oscillations -- analogous to Dicke superradiance -- mediated by persistent order parameter oscillations. In this coherently driven state, the observed sidebands result from difference-frequency mixing between the THz drive and persistent soliton dynamics. These findings establish a robust framework for coherently driving and controlling superconducting soliton time-crystal-like phases using low dissipation, time-periodic THz fields, enabling prospects for THz-speed quantum gate operations, long-lived quantum memory, and robust quantum sensing based on enhanced macroscopic pseudo-spin coherence.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2507.22383,
title = {Observation of Superconducting Solitons by Terahertz-Light-Driven Persistent Pseudo-Spin Coherence},
author = {M. Mootz and C. Vaswani and C. Huang and K. J. Lee and A. Khatri and P. Mandal and J. H. Kang and L. Luo and I. E. Perakis and C. B. Eom and J. Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.22383},
year = {2025}
}