We study the dynamics of charge-transfer insulators after a photoexcitation using the three-band Emery model which is relevant for the description of cuprate superconductors. We provide a detailed derivation of the nonequilibrium extension of the multiband
GW+EDMFT formalism and the corresponding downfolding procedure. The Peierls construction of the electron-light coupling is generalized to the multiband case resulting in a gauge invariant combination of the Peierls intraband acceleration and dipolar interband transitions. We use the formalism to study momentum-dependent (inverse) photoemission spectra and optical conductivities. The time-resolved spectral function shows a strong renormalization of the charge-transfer gap and a substantial broadening of some of the bands. While the upper Hubbard band exhibits a momentum-dependent broadening, an almost rigid band shift is observed for the ligand bands. The inverse photoemission spectrum reveals that the inclusion of nonlocal and interband charge fluctuations results in a very fast relaxation of the holes to the top of the Zhang-Rice singlet band. Consistent with the changes in the spectral function, the optical conductivity shows a renormalization of the charge-transfer gap, which is proportional to the photodoping. The details of the photoinduced changes strongly depend on the dipolar matrix elements, which calls for an ab initio determination of these parameters.
We theoretically analyze the process of charge recombination in the planar Mott-Hubbard insulators with the aim to explain the short picosecond-range lifetimes of photoexcited carriers, experimentally studied via pump-probe experiments on the undoped cuprates. The recombination mechanism consists of two essential ingredients: the formation of a metastable
s-type bound holon-doublon pair, i.e., the Mott exciton, and the decay of such an excitonic state via the multimagnon emission. In spite of the large gap that requires many bosons to be emitted, the latter process is fast due to a large exchange scale and strong charge-spin coupling in planar systems. As the starting microscopic model we consider the single-band Hubbard model and then a more realistic three-band model for cuprates, both leading to the same minimal one. The decay rate of the exciton is evaluated numerically via the Fermi golden rule, having consistency also with the direct time-evolution calculation. The decay rate reveals exponential dependence on the ratio of the Mott-Hubbard gap and the exchange coupling, the result qualitatively reproduced also within a toy exciton-boson model.
We present a calculation of the recombination rate of the excited holon-doublon pairs based on the two-dimensional model relevant for undoped cuprates, which shows that fast processes, observed in pump-probe experiments on Mott-Hubbard insulators in the picosecond range, can be explained even quantitatively with the multimagnon emission. The precondition is the existence of the Mott-Hubbard bound exciton of the s-type. We find that its decay is exponentially dependent on the Mott-Hubbard gap and on the magnon energy, with a small prefactor, which can be traced back to strong correlations and consequently large exciton-magnon coupling.