Quench dynamics of optically pumped electron-phonon systems*

Motivated by recent experimental reports of novel phases in materials driven by intense radiation fields, we use numerically exact matrix product and exact diagonalization algorithms to simulate the dynamics of a metal driven at t = 0 by a pump that excites dipole-active vibrational modes that are either linearly or quadratically coupled to electrons. We find in certain situations that the electronic properties evolve to a state characterized by a high level of effective spatial disorder. These results have implications to current experiments on pumped metallic crystals.