Breakdown of a Mott insulator -- non-adiabatic tunneling mechanism

TL;DR

This paper investigates how strong electric fields induce a transition from insulator to metal in a Mott insulator, revealing a universal tunneling mechanism and its effects on current behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a non-adiabatic tunneling framework based on Landau-Zener transitions to explain the insulator-metal transition in strongly correlated systems.

Findings

Metallization occurs via universal Landau-Zener tunneling.

Current oscillations observed in small systems.

Finite resistivity arises in larger systems over time.

Abstract

Time-dependent nonequilibrium properties of a strongly correlated electron system driven by large electric fields is obtained by means of solving the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation for the many-body wave function numerically in one dimension. While the insulator-to-metal transition depends on the electric field and the interaction, the metallization is found to be described in terms of a universal Landau-Zener quantum tunneling among the many-body levels. These processes induces current oscillation for small systems, while give rise to finite resistivity through dissipation for larger systems/on longer time scales.