Nonperturbative Nonlinear Transport in a Floquet-Weyl Semimetal

Periodic laser driving, known as Floquet engineering, is a powerful tool to manipulate the properties of quantum materials. Using circularly polarised light, artificial magnetic fields, called Berry curvature, can be created in the photon-dressed Floquet-Bloch states that form. This mechanism, when applied to 3D Dirac and Weyl systems, is predicted to lead to photon-dressed movement of Weyl nodes which should be detectable in the transport sector. The transport response of such a topological light-matter hybrid, however, remains experimentally unknown. Here, we report on the transport properties of the type-II Weyl semimetal T _d -MoTe ₂ illuminated by a femtosecond pulse of circularly polarised light. Using an ultrafast optoelectronic device architecture, we observed injection currents and a helicity-dependent anomalous Hall effect whose scaling with laser field strongly deviate from the perturbative laws of nonlinear optics. We show using Floquet theory that this discovery corresponds to the formation of a magnetic Floquet-Weyl semimetal state. Numerical ab initio simulations support this interpretation, indicating that the light-induced motion of the Weyl nodes contributes substantially to the measured transport signals. This work demonstrates the ability to generate large effective magnetic fields (> 30T) with light, which can be used to manipulate the magnetic and topological properties of a range of quantum materials.