Electronic Mechanism that Quenches Field-Driven Heating as Illustrated with the Static Holstein Model

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how an electronic mechanism can prevent runaway heating in a driven quantum system, leading to stable nonthermal states with tunable effective temperatures, using the static Holstein model.

Contribution

It introduces a mechanism for avoiding runaway heating in a driven interacting quantum system by achieving a nonthermal electron distribution in the static Holstein model.

Findings

Prethermal metastable states with nonthermal distributions form under strong driving.

Minibands with tunable effective temperatures develop as current approaches zero.

Field strength can tune miniband temperatures from positive to negative or infinite.

Abstract

Time-dependent driving of quantum systems has emerged as a powerful tool to engineer exotic phases far from thermal equilibrium, but in the presence of many-body interactions it also leads to runaway heating, so that generic systems are believed to heat up until they reach a featureless infinite-temperature state. Understanding the mechanisms by which such a heat death can be slowed down or even avoided is a major goal -- one such mechanism is to drive toward an even distribution of electrons in momentum space. Here we show how such a mechanism avoids runaway heating for an interacting charge-density-wave chain with a macroscopic number of conserved quantities when driven by a strong dc electric field; minibands with nontrivial distribution functions develop as the current is prematurely driven to zero. Moreover, when approaching a zero-temperature resonance, the field strength can tune between positive, negative, or close-to-infinite effective temperatures for each miniband. Our results suggest that nontrivial metastable distribution functions should be realized in the prethermal regime of quantum systems coupled to slow bosonic modes.