Integrable Mott insulators driven by finite electric field

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to analyze steady-state currents in driven isolated systems, revealing that integrability causes nonlinear responses and vanishing dc conductivity in one-dimensional Mott insulators at high temperatures.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach for extracting nonequilibrium steady currents and demonstrates the distinct nonlinear response of integrable Mott insulators.

Findings

Integrable Mott insulators exhibit nonlinear dc response.

Vanishing dc conductivity in the linear response regime.

Method effectively captures nonequilibrium steady states.

Abstract

We develop a method for extracting the steady nonequilibrium current from studies of driven isolated systems, applying it to the model of one-dimensional Mott insulator at high temperatures. While in the nonintegrable model the nonequilibrium conditions can be accounted by internal heating, the integrability leads to a strongly nonlinear dc response with vanishingly small dc conductivity in the linear--response regime. The finding is consistent with equilibrium results for dc limit of the optical conductivity determined in the presence of a weak and decreasing perturbation.