Intrinsic Floquet Generation and $1/I$ Quantum Oscillations in a Sliding Charge-Density Wave

Abstract

Recent experiments [Phys. Rev. B 109, 245123 (2024)] revealed striking inverse-current (1/I) quantum oscillations in quasi-one-dimensional charge-density-wave (CDW) insulators and proposed an intrinsic Floquet sideband mechanism arising from the sliding condensate. Here we develop the complete theoretical framework underlying this proposal. We provide an exact Floquet diagonalization of the uniformly sliding CDW, yielding split gap edges and a ladder of Floquet sidebands with explicit unitary transformation and spectral functions. Using this exact solution, we formulate weak-probe tunneling spectroscopy and show that the local Floquet spectrum naturally yields 1/I oscillations as successive sideband edges cross a fixed contact chemical potential. Matching the observed oscillation period to theory reveals that the macroscopic current must percolate through a highly localized coherent filament, with effective channel number N_eff ~ 480, nearly two orders of magnitude smaller than the geometric chain count N_geom ~ 3 x 10^4. This filamentary confinement is essential: achieving the required sliding frequency uniformly across the bulk would demand prohibitively large currents and induce thermal dephasing. Furthermore, using a segmented multiterminal model, we show that inelastic phase-slip dephasing near the contacts explains the observed suppression of oscillation visibility on outer voltage probes. We also contrast the persistent-current-driven multiterminal geometry with a homogeneous voltage-biased two-terminal reference calculation. Our results establish a rigorous nonequilibrium transport framework for the observed 1/I oscillations and highlight a universal spatial-to-temporal conversion mechanism in which the insulating gap protects Floquet coherence, offering a design principle for intrinsically driven quantum devices.