Inverse Faraday Effect for Superconducting Condensates

Abstract

The Cooper pairs in superconducting condensates are shown to acquire a temperature-dependent dc magnetic moment under the effect of the circularly polarized electromagnetic radiation. The mechanisms of this inverse Faraday effect are investigated within the simplest version of the phenomenological dynamic theory for superfluids, namely, the time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau (GL) model. The light-induced magnetic moment is shown to be strongly affected by the nondissipative oscillatory contribution to the superconducting order parameter dynamics, which appears due to the nonzero imaginary part of the GL relaxation time. The relevance of the latter quantity to the Hall effect in the superconducting state allows us to establish the connection between the direct and inverse Faraday phenomena.