Nonlinear Transport in One-Dimensional Mott Insulator in Strong Electric Fields

Abstract

Time-dependent Schroedinger's equation is integrated for a one-dimensional strongly-correlated electron system driven by large electric fields. For larger electric fields, many-body Landau-Zener tunneling takes place at anti-crossings of the many-body energy levels. The nonlinear $I$-$V$ characteristics as well as the time dependence of the energy expectation value are obtained. The energy of the Mott insulator in electric fields shows a saturation, which suggests a dynamical localization in energy space of many-body wave functions.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings of SCES'04 (Karlsruhe