Periodic Drive Induced Half-Metallic Phase in Insulators and Correlated Metals
Non-equilibrium control of electronic properties in condensed matter systems can result in novel phenomena. In this work, we provide a novel non-equilibrium route to realize half-metallic phases. We explore the periodically driven Hubbard model on a bipartite lattice and demonstrate that a specially designed sublattice dependent drive can transform a weakly interacting metal or insulator into a ferrimagnetic half-metal (HM). We consider a Fermi-Hubbard model with only nearest-neighbour hopping and Floquet engineer the elusive half-metal phase by driving the site potentials periodically. The drive induces staggered higher range hoppings and a staggered potential between two sublattices in the Floquet Hamiltonian. Close to the dynamical localization point, due to the suppression of nearest neighbor hopping in the driven system, an effective enhancement of various terms in the Floquet Hamiltonian, including the e-e interactions, occurs. This helps in stabilizing a broad ferrimagnetic HM phase for a wide range of drive parameters. This dynamically stabilized HM phase is a pristine platform for next-generation spintronics, topological quantum computing (specifically for engineering Majorana zero modes in hybrid nanowires) and ultrafast magnetic memory architectures.