We investigate the bulk photovoltaic effect, which rectifies light into electric current, in a collective quantum state with correlation driven electronic ferroelectricity. We show via explicit real-time dynamical calculations that the effect of the applied electric field on the electronic order parameter leads to a strong enhancement of the bulk photovoltaic effect relative to the values obtained in a conventional insulator. The enhancements include both resonant enhancements at sub-bandgap frequencies, arising from excitation of optically active collective modes, and broad-band enhancements arising from non-resonant deformations of the electronic order. The deformable electronic order parameter produces an injection current contribution to the bulk photovoltaic effect which is entirely absent in a rigid-band approximation to a time-reversal symmetric material. Our findings establish that correlation effects can lead to the bulk photovoltaic effect and demonstrate that the collective behavior of ordered states can yield large nonlinear optical responses.
تحميل البحث