Glassy dynamics of the one-dimensional Mott insulator excited by a strong terahertz pulse

Abstract

The elucidation of nonequilibrium states in strongly correlated systems holds the key to emergence of novel quantum phases. The nonequilibrium-induced insulator-to-metal transition is particularly interesting since it reflects the fundamental nature of competition between itinerancy and localization of the charge degrees of freedom. We investigate pulse-excited insulator-to-metal transition of the half-filled one-dimensional extended Hubbard model. Calculating the time-dependent optical conductivity with the time-dependent density-matrix renormalization group, we find that strong mono- and half-cycle pulses inducing quantum tunneling strongly suppress spectral weights contributing to the Drude weight σD, even if we introduce a large number of carriers Δnd. This is in contrast to a metallic behavior of σD∝Δnd induced by photon absorption and chemical doping. The strong suppression of σD in quantum tunneling is a result of the emergence of the Hilbert-space fragmentation, which makes pulse-excited states glassy.Received 9 February 2022Revised 15 May 2022Accepted 18 July 2022DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.L032019Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasLocalizationNonequilibrium statistical mechanicsOptical conductivityPhotoinduced effectQuantum statistical mechanicsPhysical Systems1-dimensional systemsGlassy systemsMott insulatorsCondensed Matter, Materials & Applied PhysicsStatistical PhysicsQuantum Information