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Universal Nonequilibrium I-V Curve at an Interacting Impurity Quantum Critical Point

Gleb Finkelstein, Harold U. Baranger, G. Zhang, C-H Chung, Chung Ting Ke, Ching‐Yu Lin, Henok T. Mebrahtu, Smirnov Ai

Published Sep 15, 2016• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Nonequilibrium properties of correlated quantum matter are being intensively investigated because of the rich interplay between the external drive and the many-body correlations. Of particular interest is the nonequilibrium behavior near a quantum critical point (QCP), where the system is delicately balanced between different ground states. Although such effects are typically out of reach, we meet this challenge, providing here both both an analytical calculation of the nonequilibrium $I$-$V$ curve when the system is tuned to be critical and experimental results to which the theory is compared. The system is a quantum dot coupled to resistive leads: a spinless resonant level interacting with an ohmic dissipative environment. A two-channel Kondo QCP occurs when the level is on resonance and symmetrically coupled to the leads. Using a bosonized representation, we calculate the nonlinear $I$-$V$ curve at the critical value of the gate voltage corresponding to this QCP. We then show that it has a physically intuitive interpretation in terms of weak backscattering of non-interacting fermions coupled to a modified environment, thus arriving at the same result through dynamical Coulomb blockade theory. The quantitative agreement between the experimental data and our theory, with no fitting parameter, is remarkable. As our system is fully accessible to both theory and experiment, it provides an ideal setting for addressing nonequilibrium phenomena in correlated quantum matter.

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Nonequilibrium properties of correlated quantum matter are being intensively investigated because of the rich interplay between the external drive and the many-body correlations. Of particular interest is the nonequilibrium behavior near a quantum critical point (QCP), where the system is delicately balanced between different ground states. Although such effects are typically out of reach, we meet this challenge, providing here both both an analytical calculation of the nonequilibrium III-VVV curve when the system is tuned to be critical and experimental results to which the theory is compared. The system is a quantum dot coupled to resistive leads: a spinless resonant level interacting with an ohmic dissipative environment. A two-channel Kondo QCP occurs when the level is on resonance and symmetrically coupled to the leads. Using a bosonized representation, we calculate the nonlinear III-VVV curve at the critical value of the gate voltage corresponding to this QCP. We then show that it has a physically intuitive interpretation in terms of weak backscattering of non-interacting fermions coupled to a modified environment, thus arriving at the same result through dynamical Coulomb blockade theory. The quantitative agreement between the experimental data and our theory, with no fitting parameter, is remarkable. As our system is fully accessible to both theory and experiment, it provides an ideal setting for addressing nonequilibrium phenomena in correlated quantum matter.
Nonequilibrium properties of correlated quantum matter are being intensively investigated because of the rich interplay between external driving and the many-body correlations. Of particular interest is the nonequilibrium behavior near a quantum critical point (QCP), where the system is delicately balanced between different ground states. We present both an analytical calculation of the nonequilibrium steady-state current in a critical system and experimental results to which the theory is compared. The system is a quantum dot coupled to resistive leads: a spinless resonant level interacting with an ohmic dissipative environment. A two channel Kondo-like QCP occurs when the level is on resonance and symmetrically coupled to the leads, conditions achieved by fine-tuning using electrostatic gates. We calculate and measure the nonlinear current as a function of bias (III-VVV curve) at the critical values of the gate voltages corresponding to the QCP. The quantitative agreement between the experimental data and the theory, with no fitting parameter, is excellent. As our system is fully accessible to both theory and experiment, it provides an ideal setting for addressing nonequilibrium phenomena in correlated quantum matter.
Over recent decades, a growing number of systems, many of them quantum critical, have been shown to exhibit non-Fermi-liquid behavior, but a full analytic understanding of such systems out of equilibrium is still lacking. In this paper, we provide a distinct example with broad applications in correlated mesoscopic systems to address this issue---a two-channel Kondo-Luttinger model where a Kondo impurity couples to two voltage-biased interacting electron leads, experimentally realizable in a dissipative quantum dot. Therein, an exotic quantum phase transition has been known to exist since the 1990s from the one-channel to two-channel Kondo ground states by enhancing electron interactions in the leads, but a controlled analytic approach to this quantum critical point has not yet been established due to the breakdown of weak-coupling perturbation theory near this strong-coupling critical point. We present a controlled method to this long-standing problem by mapping the system in the strong-coupling regime to an effective spin-boson-fermion Hamiltonian. Another type of non-Fermi-liquid quantum critical point is discovered with a distinct logarithmic-in-temperature and -voltage dependence in transport. We further obtain an analytical form for the universal differential conductance out of equilibrium near the transition. Our approach can be further generalized to study nonequilibrium physics of other strong-coupling low-dimensional non-Fermi-liquid fixed points. The relevance of our results for recent experiments is discussed.
We find the nonlinear conductance of a dissipative resonant level in the nonequilibrium steady state near its quantum critical point. The system consists of a spin-polarized quantum dot connected to two resistive leads that provide ohmic dissipation. We focus on the crossover from the strong-coupling, non-Fermi-liquid regime to the weak-coupling, Fermi-liquid ground state, a crossover driven by the instability of the quantum critical point to hybridization asymmetry or detuning of the level in the dot. We show that the crossover properties are given by tunneling through an effective single barrier described by the boundary sine-Gordon model. The nonlinear conductance is then obtained from thermodynamic Bethe ansatz results in the literature, which were developed to treat tunneling in a Luttinger liquid. The current-voltage characteristics are thus found for any value of the resistance of the leads. For the special case of lead resistance equal to the quantum resistance, we find mappings onto, first, the two-channel Kondo model and, second, an effectively noninteracting model from which the nonlinear conductance is found analytically. A key feature of the general crossover function is that the nonequilibrium crossover driven by applied bias is different from the crossover driven by temperature---we find that the nonequilibrium crossover is substantially sharper. Finally, we compare to experimental results for both the bias and temperature crossovers: the agreement is excellent.
Whether a small quantum mechanical system is able to equilibrate with its environment once an external local perturbation drives it out of thermal equilibrium is a central question which cuts across many different fields of science. Here we consider such a problem for a correlated quantum impurity coupled to a fermionic reservoir and driven out of equilibrium by local quantum quenches such as those recently realized in optical absorption experiments on single quantum dots. We argue that equilibration in this problem is deeply connected to the occurrence of the Kondo effect at low energy and that a highly nontrivial dynamical behavior may emerge whenever a local quantum critical point intrudes between a conventional Kondo screened phase and a Kondo unscreened one. We discuss this issue in the context of the Anderson impurity model coupled to a pseudogap reservoir by using a correlated time-dependent variational wave function that is able to qualitatively describe this physics
The dynamical decoherence rate and charge susceptibility of a nonequilibrium quantum dot close to a dissipative quantum phase transition are calculated. The setup concerns a resonance-level quantum dot coupled to two spinless fermionic baths with a finite bias voltage and an ohmic bosonic bath representing a dissipative environment. The system is equivalent to an anisotropic Kondo model. As dissipation strength increases, the system at zero temperature and zero bias exhibits a quantum phase transition of the Kosterlitz-Thouless (KT) type between a conducting delocalized phase and an insulating localized phase. Within the nonequilibrium frequency-dependent renormalization group (RG) approach, the finite bias crossover in dynamical decoherence rate and charge susceptibility close to the transition are addressed. The dynamical decoherence rate is found to increase with increasing frequency. In the delocalized phase, it shows a singularity at frequencies equal to positive or negative bias voltage. As the system cross overs to the localized phase, the decoherence rate at low frequencies gets progressively smaller and the singular feature is gradually smeared out, leading to a single linear frequency dependence. The dynamical charge susceptibility at low frequencies shows a dip-to-peak crossover across the transition. Relevance of these results to the experiments is discussed.
The resonant-level model represents a paradigmatic quantum system which serves as a basis for many other quantum impurity models. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the nonequilibrium transport near a quantum phase transition in a spinless dissipative resonant-level model, extending earlier work [Phys. Rev. Lett 102, 216803 (2009)]. A detailed derivation of a rigorous mapping of our system onto an effective Kondo model is presented. A controlled energy-dependent renormalization-group approach is applied to compute the nonequilibrium current in the presence of a finite bias voltage VVV. In the linear-response regime $V\ensuremath{\rightarrow}0$, the system exhibits as a function of the dissipative strength a localized-delocalized quantum transition of the Kosterlitz-Thouless (KT) type. We address fundamental issues of the nonequilibrium transport near the quantum phase transition: Does the bias voltage play the same role as temperature to smear out the transition? What is the scaling of the nonequilibrium conductance near the transition? At finite temperatures, we show that the conductance follows the equilibrium scaling for V<TV<TV<T, while it obeys a distinct nonequilibrium profile for V>TV>TV>T. We furthermore provide different signatures of the transition in the finite-frequency current noise and ac conductance via a recently developed functional renormalization group (FRG) approach. The generalization of our analysis to nonequilibrium transport through a resonant level coupled to two chiral Luttinger liquid leads, generated by fractional quantum Hall edge states, is discussed. Our work on the dissipative resonant level has direct relevance to experiments on a quantum dot coupled to a resistive environment, such as H. Mebrahtu et al., [Nature (London) 488, 61 (2012)].