Physicists show that light can generate electricity even in translucent materials

"It is possible to drive electric currents by light even when the material has a vanishingly small absorption of such light. This is an important new insight," adds his colleague Li-kun Shi.

Inti Sodemann Villadiego and his colleagues investigated what are known as "Floquet Fermi liquid" states. A Fermi liquid is a special state of many quantum mechanical particles with properties that can be very different from those of ordinary classical liquids such as water at ambient temperature. Fermi liquids can arise in a wide variety of situations, from common materials such as the electrical fluid of electrons in metals like gold or silver, to more exotic situations such as the fluid of Helium-3 atoms at low temperatures. They can display "spectacular properties," such as becoming superconductors of electricity at low temperatures. The "Floquet Fermi liquid" is a variant of this state realised when the particles of the fluid are periodically shaken, such as what happens to electrons in metals when they are illuminated by ideally periodic light.

"In our publication, we explain several properties of these fluid states," says Professor Sodemann Villadiego. "To study them, we had to develop detailed theoretical models of complex states of electrons shaken by light, which is far from easy."