We can 'trick' materials into acting like superconductors just by hitting them with specific pulses of light.
April 14, 2026
Original Paper
Microscopic mechanism for resonant light-enhanced pair correlations in K$_3$C$_{60}$
arXiv · 2604.10987
The Takeaway
Rather than relying on extreme cold or chemical changes, this discovery uses a two-photon electronic pathway to create superconducting-like correlations. It suggests we could one day turn on high-performance electronics with the flick of a laser.
From the abstract
Recent experiments on K$_3$C$_{60}$ revealed a giant enhancement of the light-induced superconducting-like optical response for pump frequencies near 10 THz, with an efficiency roughly two orders of magnitude larger than for off-resonant excitation. Here we show that a resonant enhancement of pair correlations arises naturally in a driven electronic model of K$_3$C$_{60}$ derived from \emph{ab initio} parameters. Exact diagonalization on small clusters identifies a symmetry-constrained two-photo