No Arabic abstract
We examine the exact equation of motion for the relaxation of populations of strongly correlated electrons after a nonequilibrium excitation by a pulsed field, and prove that the populations do not change when the Greens functions have no average time dependence. We show how the average time dependence enters into the equation of motion to lowest order and describe what governs the relaxation process of the electron populations in the long-time limit. While this result may appear, on the surface, to be required by any steady-state solution, the proof is nontrivial, and provides new critical insight into how nonequilibrium populations relax, which goes beyond the assumption that they thermalize via a simple relaxation rate determined by the imaginary part of the self-energy, or that they can be described by a quasi-equilibrium condition with a Fermi-Dirac distribution and a time-dependent temperature. We also discuss the implications of this result to approximate theories, which may not satisfy the exact relation in the equation of motion.
We study the role of excited phonon populations in the relaxation rates of nonequilibrium electrons using a nonequilibrium Greens function formalism. The transient modifications in the phononic properties are accounted for by self-consistently solving the Dyson equation for the electron and phonon Greens functions. The pump induced changes manifest in both the electronic and phononic spectral functions. We find that the excited phonon populations suppress the decay rates of nonequilibrium electrons due to enhanced phonon absorption. The increased phonon occupation also sets the nonequilibrium decay rates and the equilibrium scattering rates apart. The decay rates are found to be time-dependent, and this is illustrated in the experimentally observed population decay of photoexcited $mathrm{Bi}_{1.5}mathrm{Sb}_{0.5} mathrm{Te}_{1.7}mathrm{Se}_{1.3}$.
We give a brief summary of the current status of the electron many-body problem in graphene. We claim that graphene has intrinsic dielectric properties which should dress the interactions among the quasiparticles, and may explain why the observation of electron-electron renormalization effects has been so elusive in the recent experiments. We argue that the strength of Coulomb interactions in graphene may be characterized by an effective fine structure constant given by $alpha^{star}(mathbf{k},omega)equiv2.2/epsilon(mathbf{k},omega)$, where $epsilon(mathbf{k},omega)$ is the dynamical dielectric function. At long wavelengths, $alpha^{star}(mathbf{k},omega)$ appears to have its smallest value in the static regime, where $alpha^{star}(mathbf{k}to0,0)approx1/7$ according to recent inelastic x-ray measurements, and the largest value in the optical limit, where $alpha^{star}(0,omega)approx2.6$. We conclude that the strength of Coulomb interactions in graphene is not universal, but depends highly on the scale of the phenomenon of interest. We propose a prescription in order to reconcile different experiments.
Do electrons become ferromagnetic just because of their repulisve Coulomb interaction? Our calculations on the three-dimensional electron gas imply that itinerant ferromagnetim of delocalized electrons without lattice and band structure, the most basic model considered by Stoner, is suppressed due to many-body correlations as speculated already by Wigner, and a possible ferromagnetic transition lowering the density is precluded by the formation of the Wigner crystal.
We present here the details of a method [A. B. Culver and N. Andrei, Phys. Rev. B 103, L201103 (2021)] for calculating the time-dependent many-body wavefunction that follows a local quench. We apply the method to the voltage-driven nonequilibrium Kondo model to find the exact time-evolving wavefunction following a quench where the dot is suddenly attached to the leads at $t=0$. The method, which does not use Bethe ansatz, also works in other quantum impurity models and may be of wider applicability. We show that the long-time limit (with the system size taken to infinity first) of the time-evolving wavefunction of the Kondo model is a current-carrying nonequilibrium steady state that satisfies the Lippmann-Schwinger equation. We show that the electric current in the time-evolving wavefunction is given by a series expression that can be expanded either in weak coupling or in strong coupling, converging to all orders in the steady-state limit in either case. The series agrees to leading order with known results in the well-studied regime of weak antiferromagnetic coupling and also reveals a universal regime of strong ferromagnetic coupling with Kondo temperature $T_K^{(F)} = D e^{-frac{3pi^2}{8} rho |J|}$ ($J<0$, $rho|J|toinfty$). In this regime, the differential conductance $dI/dV$ reaches the unitarity limit $2e^2/h$ asymptotically at large voltage or temperature.
We theoretically investigate the effects of the lattice geometry on the nonequilibrium dynamics of photo-excited carriers in a half-filled two-dimensional Hubbard model. Using a nonequilibrium generalization of the dynamical cluster approximation, we compare the relaxation dynamics in lattices which interpolate between the triangular lattice and square lattice configuration and thus reveal the role of the geometric frustration in these strongly correlated nonequilibrium systems. In particular, we show that the cooling effect resulting from the disordering of the spin background is less effective in the triangular case because of the frustration. This manifests itself in a longer relaxation time of the photo-doped population, as measured by the time-resolved photo-emission signal, and a higher effective temperature of the photo-doped carriers in the non-thermal steady state after the intra-Hubbard-band thermalization.