Nonlinear transport through two-terminal strongly-correlated heterostructures: A dynamical-mean-field approach

TL;DR

This paper uses the dynamical-mean-field method to study nonlinear electronic transport in heterostructures with strongly-correlated regions, revealing how spectral functions and properties like double occupancy vary with bias and interaction strength.

Contribution

It introduces a dynamical-mean-field approach to analyze nonlinear transport in strongly-correlated heterostructures, highlighting the sensitivity of spectral functions and electronic properties to bias and interactions.

Findings

Current-voltage characteristics are highly nonlinear.

Spectral functions inside the correlated region are sensitive to bias and interaction.

Electronic properties like double occupancy change with bias voltage.

Abstract

The dynamical-mean-field method is applied to investigate the transport properties of heterostructures consisting of a strongly-correlated electron system connected to metallic leads. The spectral function inside the correlated region is sensitive to the change of the interaction strength and bias voltage. Because of this sensitivity, current vs voltage characteristics of such heterostructures are rather nonlinear regardless of the detail of the potential profile inside the correlated region. The electronic properties such as the double occupancy are also changed by the bias voltage.