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Scientific Reports

$${\mathcal{P}}{\mathcal{T}}$$-Symmetric Effective Model for Nonequilibrium Phase Transitions in a Dissipative Fermionic Mott Insulator Chain

Vikram Tripathi, V. M. Vinokur

Published Apr 29, 2020• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract Nonequilibrium phase transitions in open dissipative systems can be described as instabilities in the spectra and wavefunctions of effective non-Hermitian Hamiltonians invariant under simultaneous parity ( $$\boldsymbol{\mathcal{P}}$$ P ) and time-reversal ( $$\boldsymbol{\mathcal{T}}$$ T ) transformations. The degree of non-Hermiticity reflects the strength of the external drive and dissipation, and the transition is described as a loss of the $$\boldsymbol{\mathcal{P}}\boldsymbol{\mathcal{T}}$$ PT symmetry of the solutions corresponding to stationary low-drive dynamics. This approach has been successfully applied to spin, superconducting, and Mott insulator systems. However, the microscopic foundations for the employed phenomenological models are currently lacking. Here we propose a microscopic mechanism leading to the $$\boldsymbol{\mathcal{P}}\boldsymbol{\mathcal{T}}$$ PT -symmetric effective model in the context of the nonequilibrium Mott transition in a dissipative Hubbard chain. Our model comprises a half-filled fermionic Hubbard chain subject to a constant electric field. The dissipation is introduced via the electron-phonon coupling. We obtain the explicit expressions for the non-Hermitian parameter in terms of the electron-phonon coupling strength and driving field. Analyzing the implications of microscopic model, we find a re-entrant Mott insulator with the increasing electric field for phonon density of states that increases slower than the square of the energy (such as in one or two dimensions), or varies non-monotonously with energy.

DOI
10.1038/s41598-020-64222-x

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PT{\mathcal{P}}{\mathcal{T}}PT-Symmetric Effective Model for Nonequilibrium Phase Transitions in a Dissipative Fermionic Mott Insulator Chain
Abstract Nonequilibrium phase transitions in open dissipative systems can be described as instabilities in the spectra and wavefunctions of effective non-Hermitian Hamiltonians invariant under simultaneous parity ( P\boldsymbol{\mathcal{P}}P P ) and time-reversal ( T\boldsymbol{\mathcal{T}}T T ) transformations. The degree of non-Hermiticity reflects the strength of the external drive and dissipation, and the transition is described as a loss of the PT\boldsymbol{\mathcal{P}}\boldsymbol{\mathcal{T}}PT PT symmetry of the solutions corresponding to stationary low-drive dynamics. This approach has been successfully applied to spin, superconducting, and Mott insulator systems. However, the microscopic foundations for the employed phenomenological models are currently lacking. Here we propose a microscopic mechanism leading to the PT\boldsymbol{\mathcal{P}}\boldsymbol{\mathcal{T}}PT PT -symmetric effective model in the context of the nonequilibrium Mott transition in a dissipative Hubbard chain. Our model comprises a half-filled fermionic Hubbard chain subject to a constant electric field. The dissipation is introduced via the electron-phonon coupling. We obtain the explicit expressions for the non-Hermitian parameter in terms of the electron-phonon coupling strength and driving field. Analyzing the implications of microscopic model, we find a re-entrant Mott insulator with the increasing electric field for phonon density of states that increases slower than the square of the energy (such as in one or two dimensions), or varies non-monotonously with energy.
We describe the critical behavior of the electric field-driven (dynamic) Mott insulator-to-metal transitions in dissipative Fermi and Bose systems in terms of non-Hermitian Hamiltonians invariant under simultaneous parity (P)(\mathcal{P})(P) and time-reversal (T)(\mathcal{T})(T) operations. The dynamic Mott transition is identified as a PT\mathcal{PT}PT symmetry-breaking phase transition, with the Mott insulating state corresponding to the regime of unbroken PT\mathcal{PT}PT symmetry with a real energy spectrum. We establish that the imaginary part of the Hamiltonian arises from the combined effects of the driving field and inherent dissipation. We derive the renormalization and collapse of the Mott gap at the dielectric breakdown and describe the resulting critical behavior of transport characteristics. The obtained critical exponent is in an excellent agreement with experimental findings.
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.
We investigate the dynamical properties of one-dimensional dissipative Fermi-Hubbard models, which are described by the Lindblad master equations with site-dependent jump operators. The corresponding non-Hermitian effective Hamiltonians with pure loss terms possess parity-time (PT\mathcal{PT}PT) symmetry if we compensate the system additionally with an overall gain term. By solving exactly the two-site Lindblad equation with fixed dissipation, we find that the dynamics of the rescaled density matrix shows an instability as the interaction increases over a threshold, which can be equivalently described in the scheme of non-Hermitian effective Hamiltonians. This instability is also observed in multisite systems and closely related to the PT\mathcal{PT}PT-symmetry breaking accompanied by appearance of complex eigenvalues of the effective Hamiltonian. Moreover, we unveil that the dynamical instability of the antiferromagnetic Mott phase comes from the PT\mathcal{PT}PT-symmetry breaking in highly excited bands, although the low-energy effective model of the non-Hermitian Hubbard model in the strongly interacting regime is always Hermitian. We also provide a quantitative estimation of the time for the observation of dynamical PT\mathcal{PT}PT-symmetry breaking which could be probed in experiments.
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.
We study the quench dynamics of noninteracting fermionic quantum many-body systems that are subjected to Markovian drive and dissipation and are described by a quadratic Liouvillian which has parity-time (PT) symmetry. In recent work, we have shown that such systems relax locally to a maximum entropy ensemble that we have dubbed the PT-symmetric generalized Gibbs ensemble (PTGGE), in analogy to the generalized Gibbs ensemble that describes the steady state of isolated integrable quantum many-body systems after a quench. Here, using driven-dissipative versions of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model and the Kitaev chain as paradigmatic model systems, we corroborate and substantially expand upon our previous results. In particular, we confirm the validity of a dissipative quasiparticle picture at finite dissipation by demonstrating light cone spreading of correlations and the linear growth and saturation to the PTGGE prediction of the quasiparticle-pair contribution to the subsystem entropy in the PT-symmetric phase. Further, we introduce the concept of directional pumping phases, which is related to the non-Hermitian topology of the Liouvillian and based upon qualitatively different dynamics of the dual string order parameter and the subsystem fermion parity in the SSH model and the Kitaev chain, respectively: depending on the postquench parameters, there can be pumping of string order and fermion parity through both ends of a subsystem corresponding to a finite segment of the one-dimensional lattice, through only one end, or there can be no pumping at all. We show that transitions between dynamical pumping phases give rise to a new and independent type of dynamical critical behavior of the rates of directional pumping, which are determined by the soft modes of the PTGGE. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We investigated the behavior of non-Hermitian bosonic gases with Hubbard interactions in one-dimensional (1D) zigzag optical lattices through the calculation of dynamic response functions. Our findings showed the existence of a non-Hermitian quantum phase transition that is dependent on the pseudo-Hermitian symmetry. The system tends to exhibit a superfluid phase when subjected to weak dissipation. While under strong dissipation, the pseudo-Hermitian symmetry of the system is partially broken, leading to a transition toward a normal liquid phase. As the dissipation increases beyond the critical threshold, the pseudo-Hermitian symmetry is completely broken, resulting in a Mott-insulator phase. We propose an experimental setup using 1D zigzag optical lattices containing two-electron atoms to realize this system. In this paper, we emphasize the key role of non-Hermiticity in quantum phase transitions and offer a theoretical framework as well as experimental methods for understanding the behavior of dissipative quantum systems, implicating significant development of quantum devices and technologies.