Cavity-induced Eliashberg effect: superconductivity vs charge density wave

Abstract

Recent experiments have shown that non-equilibrium effects can play a key role in cavity-based control of material phases, notably in systems with charge-density-wave order. Motivated by this, we extend the theory of the Eliashberg effect, originally developed for superconducting phases, to charge-density-wave phases. Starting from a minimal electronic model where superconductivity and charge-density-wave order are equivalent at equilibrium, we introduce coupling to cavity photons, which are in turn coupled to an environment at a temperature different from the one of the electronic environment. This drives the system into a non-thermal steady state, which breaks the equivalence between superconductivity and charge-density-wave order. In the superconducting case, we recover the known behavior: a shift from continuous to discontinuous phase transitions with bistability. In contrast, the charge-density-wave case displays richer behavior: tuning the cavity frequency induces both continuous and discontinuous transitions, two distinct ordered phases, and a bistable regime ending at a critical point. These findings demonstrate that the scope of cavity-based non-thermal control of quantum materials is broader than at thermal equilibrium, and strongly depends on the targeted phases.