Dielectric Breakdown in a Mott Insulator: Many-body Schwinger-Landau-Zener Mechanism studied with a Generalized Bethe Ansatz

TL;DR

This paper investigates the dielectric breakdown of one-dimensional Mott insulators under strong electric fields, introducing a many-body tunneling mechanism analyzed through an advanced Bethe ansatz approach.

Contribution

It develops a novel analytical method combining Dykhne-Davis-Pechukas tunneling with a non-Hermitian Bethe ansatz for excited states in the Hubbard model.

Findings

Analytical tunneling probabilities match DMRG results

Reveals a many-body Schwinger-Landau-Zener mechanism

Provides insights into dielectric breakdown in strongly correlated systems

Abstract

The nonadiabatic quantum tunneling picture, which may be called the many-body Schwinger-Landau-Zener mechanism, for the dielectric breakdown of Mott insulators in strong electric fields is studied in the one-dimensional Hubbard model. The tunneling probability is calculated by a metod due to Dykhne-Davis-Pechukas with an analytical continuation of the Bethe-ansatz solution for excited states to a non-Hermitian case. A remarkable agreement with the time-dependent density matrix renormalization group result is obtained.