Phonon effects, impact ionization and power conversion in Mott photovoltaic systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how acoustic phonons influence photocurrent, spectral features, and power output in Mott insulator-based photovoltaic systems using advanced nonequilibrium theoretical methods.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of phonon effects on impact ionization and power conversion in Mott photovoltaic devices with a novel combination of Floquet DMFT and impurity solvers.

Findings

Impact ionization is weakly affected by phonons at low bias.

Higher biases cause Hartree shifts that suppress photocurrent.

Electron-phonon interactions reduce the electrical power output.

Abstract

We analyze the effect of acoustic phonons on the photocurrent and the spectral characteristics of a simplified photovoltaic setup made of Mott insulating layers between two metallic leads among which a bias voltage is applied. We include acoustic phonons via the Migdal approximation and we use real-space Floquet dynamical mean-field theory to address the nonequilibrium Floquet steady-state. The so-called auxiliary master equation approach is employed as impurity solver. We find that impact ionization is only weakly affected by dissipation by acoustic phonons at low bias voltages. For higher biases instead, the Hartree shift considerably alters the on-site energies of the Hubbard bands and suppresses the photocurrent for intermediate electron-phonon coupling strengths. Impact ionization processes play a fundamental role in enhancing the electrical output power, which decreases when electron-phonon interaction is considered.