No Arabic abstract
We use a Langevin dynamics approach to map out the thermal phases of an antiferromagnetic Mott insulator pushed out of equilibrium by a large voltage bias. The Mott insulator is realised in the half-filled Hubbard model in a three dimensional bar geometry with leads at voltage $pm V/2$ connected at the two ends. We decouple the strong Hubbard interaction via the combination of an auxiliary vector field, to capture magnetic fluctuations, and a homogeneous scalar field to maintain half-filling. The magnetic fluctuations are assumed to be slow on electronic timescales. At zero temperature our method reduces to Keldysh mean field theory and yields a voltage driven insulator-metal transition with hysteresis. The Langevin scheme generalises this, allowing us to study the finite temperature nonequilibrium steady state. We find an initially slow and then progressively rapid suppression of the Neel temperature $T_{N}$ and pseudogap temperature $T_{pg}$ with bias, and discover that the bias leads to a finite temperature insulator-metal transition. We explain the thermal results in terms of strong amplitude fluctuation of the local moments in the first order landscape.
We develop a real space theory of the voltage bias driven transition from a Mott insulator to a correlated metal. Within our Keldysh mean field approach the problem reduces to a self-consistency scheme for the charge and spin profiles in this open system. We solve this problem for a two dimensional antiferromagnetic Mott insulator at zero temperature. The charge and spin magnitude is uniform over the system at zero bias, but a bias $V$ leads to spatial modulation over a lengthscale $xi(V)$ near the edges. $xi(V)$ grows rapidly and becomes comparable to system size as $V$ increases towards a threshold scale $V_c$. The linear response conductance of the insulator is zero with the current being exponentially small for $V ll V_c$. The current increases rapidly as $V rightarrow V_c$. Beyond $V_c$, we observe an inhomogeneous low moment antiferromagnetic metal, and at even larger bias a current saturated paramagnetic metal. We suggest an approximate scheme for the spectral features of this nonequilibrium system.
We present a new type of colossal magnetoresistance (CMR) arising from an anomalous collapse of the Mott insulating state via a modest magnetic field in a bilayer ruthenate, Ti-doped Ca$_3$Ru$_2$O$_7$. Such an insulator-metal transition is accompanied by changes in both lattice and magnetic structures. Our findings have important implications because a magnetic field usually stabilizes the insulating ground state in a Mott-Hubbard system, thus calling for a deeper theoretical study to reexamine the magnetic field tuning of Mott systems with magnetic and electronic instabilities and spin-lattice-charge coupling. This study further provides a model approach to search for CMR systems other than manganites, such as Mott insulators in the vicinity of the boundary between competing phases.
We investigate the quantum mechanical origin of resistive phase transitions in solids driven by a constant electric field in the vicinity of a metal-insulator transition. We perform a nonequilibrium mean-field analysis of a driven-dissipative anti-ferromagnet, which we solve analytically for the most part. We find that the insulator-to-metal transition (IMT) and the metal-to-insulator transition (MIT) proceed by two distinct electronic mechanisms: Landau-Zener processes, and the destabilization of metallic state by Joule heating, respectively. However, we show that both regimes can be unified in a common effective thermal description, where the effective temperature $T_{rm eff}$ depends on the state of the system. This explains recent experimental measurements in which the hot-electron temperature at the IMT was found to match the equilibrium transition temperature. Our analytic approach enables us to formulate testable predictions on the non-analytic behavior of $I$-$V$ relation near the insulator-to-metal transition. Building on these successes, we propose an effective Ginzburg-Landau theory which paves the way to incorporating spatial fluctuations, and to bringing the theory closer to a realistic description of the resistive switchings in correlated materials.
We define, compute and analyze the nonequilibrium differential optical conductivity of the one-dimensional extended Hubbard model at half-filling after applying a pump pulse, using the time-dependent density matrix renormalization group method. The melting of the Mott insulator is accompanied by a suppression of the local magnetic moment and ensuing photogeneration of doublon-holon pairs. The differential optical conductivity reveals $(i)$ mid-gap states related to parity-forbidden optical states, and $(ii)$ strong renormalization and hybridization of the excitonic resonance and the absorption band, yielding a Fano resonance. We offer evidence and interpret such a resonance as a signature of nonequilibrium optical excitations resembling excitonic strings, (bi)excitons, and unbound doublon-holon pairs, depending on the magnitude of the intersite Coulomb repulsion. We discuss our results in the context of pump and probe spectroscopy experiments on organic Mott insulators.
Metal-insulator transitions (MIT) belong to a class of fascinating physical phenomena, which includes superconductivity, and colossal magnetoresistance (CMR), that are associated with drastic modifications of electrical resistance. In transition metal compounds, MIT are often related to the presence of strong electronic correlations that drive the system into a Mott insulator state. In these systems the MIT is usually tuned by electron doping or by applying an external pressure. However, it was noted recently that a Mott insulator should also be sensitive to other external perturbations such as an electric field. We report here the first experimental evidence of a non-volatile electric-pulse-induced insulator-to-metal transition and possible superconductivity in the Mott insulator GaTa4Se8. Our Scanning Tunneling Microscopy experiments show that this unconventional response of the system to short electric pulses arises from a nanometer scale Electronic Phase Separation (EPS) generated in the bulk material.