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arXiv:1804.08257 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Nonequilibrium steady states of electric field driven Mott insulators

Yuta Murakami, Philipp Werner

Published Aug 2, 2018• 56 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We present a systematic study of the nonequilibrium steady states (NESS) in Mott insulators driven by dc or ac electric fields, based on the Floquet dynamical mean-field theory. The results are analyzed using a generalized tunneling formula for the current, which is reminiscent of the Meir-Wingreen formula and provides insights into the relevant physical processes. In the dc case, the spectrum of the NESSs exhibits Wannier-Stark (WS) states associated with the lower and upper Hubbard bands. In addition, there emerge WS sidebands from many-body states. Using the tunneling formula, we demonstrate that the tunneling between these WS states leads to peaks or humps in the induced dc current. In the ac case, we cover a wide parameter range of excitation frequencies and field strengths to clarify the crossover from field-induced tunneling behavior in the dc limit to nonequilibrium states dominated by multiphoton absorption in the ac limit. In the crossover regime, the single-particle spectrum is characterized by a coexistence of Floquet sidebands and WS peaks, and the current and double occupation exhibit a nontrivial dependence on the field strength. The tunneling formula works quantitatively well even in the ac case, and we use it to discuss the potential cooperation of tunneling and multiphoton processes in the crossover regime. The tunneling formula and its simplified versions also provide physical insights into the high-harmonic generation in Mott insulators.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.98.075102

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We present a systematic study of the nonequilibrium steady states (NESS) in Mott insulators driven by dc or ac electric fields, based on the Floquet dynamical mean-field theory. The results are analyzed using a generalized tunneling formula for the current, which is reminiscent of the Meir-Wingreen formula and provides insights into the relevant physical processes. In the dc case, the spectrum of the NESSs exhibits Wannier-Stark (WS) states associated with the lower and upper Hubbard bands. In addition, there emerge WS sidebands from many-body states. Using the tunneling formula, we demonstrate that the tunneling between these WS states leads to peaks or humps in the induced dc current. In the ac case, we cover a wide parameter range of excitation frequencies and field strengths to clarify the crossover from field-induced tunneling behavior in the dc limit to nonequilibrium states dominated by multiphoton absorption in the ac limit. In the crossover regime, the single-particle spectrum is characterized by a coexistence of Floquet sidebands and WS peaks, and the current and double occupation exhibit a nontrivial dependence on the field strength. The tunneling formula works quantitatively well even in the ac case, and we use it to discuss the potential cooperation of tunneling and multiphoton processes in the crossover regime. The tunneling formula and its simplified versions also provide physical insights into the high-harmonic generation in Mott insulators.
In this work, we explore the possibility of emergent nonequilibrium steady states arising from the electric-field-driven Mott insulator via the Keldysh-Floquet dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT), which can determine the fully interacting, nonequilibrium steady-state Green's functions with the noninteracting counterparts as an input to the DMFT self-consistency loop. Unlike the retarded component, obtaining the lesser Green's function for the noninteracting system presents an important obstacle since the thermalization of the noninteracting system still requires a precise understanding of the dissipation mechanism. A crucial breakthrough in this work is that the noninteracting lesser Green's function can be determined in terms of the Wannier-Stark ladder (WSL) eigenstates, which are thermalized via the standard canonical ensemble according to the Markovian quantum master equation. As a result, it is shown that the intricate interplay between strong correlation and large electric field can generate a sequence of two dielectric breakdowns with the first induced by a coherent reconstruction of the midgap state within the Mott gap and the second by an incoherent tunneling through the biased Hubbard bands. It is predicted that the reconstructed midgap state generates its own emergent WSL structure with a reduced effective electric field. The two dielectric breakdowns are mediated by a reentrant insulating phase, which is characterized by the population inversion, causing instability toward inhomogeneous current density states at weak electron-impurity scattering.
We study the spectral and transport properties of a Mott insulator driven by a static electric field into a nonequilibrium steady state. For the dissipation, we consider two mechanisms: wide band fermion reservoirs and phonons included within the Migdal approximation. The electron correlations are treated via nonequilibrium dynamical mean field theory with an impurity solver suitable for strong correlations. We find that dissipation via phonons is limited to restricted ranges of field values around Wannier-Stark resonances. To cover the full range of field strengths, we allow for a small coupling with fermionic baths, which stabilizes the solution. When considering both dissipation mechanisms, we find that phonons enhance the current for field strengths close to half of the gap while lowering it at the gap resonance as compared to the purely electronic dissipation used by Murakami and Werner [Murakami and Werner, Phys. Rev. B 98, 075102 (2018)]. Once phonons are the only dissipation mechanism, the current in the metallic phase is almost one order of magnitude smaller than the typical values obtained by coupling to a fermionic bath. In this case, the transport regime is characterized by an accumulation of charge in the upper Hubbard band described by two effective chemical potentials.
Understanding strongly correlated systems driven out of equilibrium is a challenging task necessitating the simultaneous treatment of quantum mechanics, dynamical constraints, and strong interactions. A Mott insulator subjected to a uniform and static electric field is prototypical, raising key questions such as the fate of Bloch oscillations with increasing correlation strength, the approach to a steady-state DC transport regime and the role of dissipation in it, and electric-field-driven phase transitions. Despite tremendous efforts over the past decade employing various numerical and analytical approaches, the manner in which a nonequilibrium steady state gets established has remained an unresolved problem. We develop here an effective large-N\mathcal{N}N Keldysh field theory for studying nonequilibrium transport in a regular one-dimensional dissipative Mott insulator system subjected to a uniform electric field. Upon abruptly turning on the electric field (a quench), a transient oscillatory current response reminiscent of Bloch oscillations is found. In the regime of small tunneling conductance the amplitude of these oscillations, over a large time window, decreases as an inverse square power law in time, ultimately going over to an exponential decay beyond a large characteristic time ${\ensuremath{\tau}}_{d}$ that increases with N.\mathcal{N}.N. Such a relaxation to a steady-state DC response is absent in the dissipation-free Hubbard chain at half filling. The steady-state current at small fields is governed by large-distance cotunneling, a process absent in the equilibrium counterpart. The low-field DC current has a Landau-Zener-Schwinger form but qualitatively differs from the expression for pair-production probability for the dissipation-free counterpart. The breakdown of perturbation theory in the Mott phase possibly signals a nonequilibrium phase transition to a metallic phase. Our study sheds light on the approach of a driven, dissipative strongly correlated system to a nonequilibrium steady state and also provides a general analytic microscopic framework for understanding other nonequilibrium phenomena in these systems.
Combining Floquet theory with the hierarchy of correlations (a method based on the formal expansion into inverse powers of the coordination number), we study the nonequilibrium dynamics of the Mott insulator state in the Fermi-Hubbard model under the influence of a harmonically oscillating electric field representing the pump laser. After deriving the associated Floquet exponents, we consider multiphoton resonances leading to the generation of higher harmonics. For weak electric field strengths, the strongest signal is obtained for the third harmonic when the driving frequency equals one-third of the Mott gap (because even harmonics are absent due to inversion symmetry). For stronger electric field strengths and lower driving frequencies, the higher-harmonic spectrum can also exhibit plateaulike structures extending over several harmonics (i.e., Floquet channels) below the resonance peak, which is consistent with previous findings.
In order to investigate photoinduced insulator-metal transitions observed in correlated electron systems, we propose a new theoretical method, where we combine a Floquet-matrix method for AC-driven systems with the dynamical mean-field theory. The method can treat nonequilibrium steady states exactly beyond the linear-response regime. We have applied the method to the Falicov-Kimball model coupled to AC electric fields, and numerically obtained the spectral function, the nonequilibrium distribution function and the current-voltage characteristic. The results show that intense AC fields indeed drive Mott-like insulating states into photoinduced metallic states in a nonlinear way.
Time-periodically driven systems are a versatile toolbox for realizing interesting effective Hamiltonians. Heating, caused by excitations to high-energy states, is a challenge for experiments. While most setups so far address the relatively weakly interacting regime, it is of general interest to study heating in strongly correlated systems. Using Floquet dynamical mean-field theory, we study nonequilibrium steady states (NESS) in the Falicov-Kimball model, with time-periodically driven kinetic energy or interaction. We systematically investigate the nonequilibrium properties of the NESS. For a driven kinetic energy, we show that resonant tunneling, where the interaction is an integer multiple of the driving frequency, plays an important role in the heating. In the strongly correlated regime, we show that this can be well understood using Fermi's golden rule and the Schrieffer-Wolff transformation for a time-periodically driven system. We furthermore demonstrate that resonant tunneling can be used to control the population of Floquet states to achieve ``photodoping.'' For driven interactions introduced by an oscillating magnetic field near a widely adopted Feshbach resonance, we find that the double occupancy is strongly modulated. Our calculations apply to shaken ultracold-atom systems and to solid-state systems in a spatially uniform but time-dependent electric field. They are also closely related to lattice modulation spectroscopy. Our calculations are helpful to understand the latest experiments on strongly correlated Floquet systems.