Effect of Electric Field on One-Dimensional Insulators: A DMRG study

TL;DR

This study uses DMRG calculations to investigate how electric fields induce insulator-metal transitions in one-dimensional Mott and Peierls systems, revealing size-dependent effects and a breakdown mechanism different from Landau-Zener predictions.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of electric field-induced insulator-metal transitions in 1D systems using DMRG, highlighting size effects and the breakdown mechanism.

Findings

Electric field causes insulator-metal transitions in finite and infinite systems.

Transition sharpens with increasing system size.

Breakdown mechanism differs from Landau-Zener theory.

Abstract

We perform density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) calculations extensively on one dimensional Mott and Peierls chains with explicit inclusion of the static bias to study the insulator-metal transition in those systems. We find that the electric field induces a number of insulator-metal transitions for finite size systems and at the thermodynamic limit, the insulating system breaks down into a completely conducting state at a critical value of bias which depends strongly on the insulating parameters. Our results indicate that the breakdown, in both the Peierls and Mott insulators, at thermodynamic limit, does not follow the Landau-Zener mechanism. Calculations on various size systems indicate that an increase in the system size decreases the threshold bias as well as the charge gap at that bias, making the insulator-metal transition sharper in both cases.