Emergence of Bloch oscillations in one-dimensional systems

Abstract

Electrons in periodic potentials exhibit oscillatory motion in presence of an electric field. Such oscillations are known as Bloch oscillations. In this article we theoretically investigate the emergence of Bloch oscillations for systems where the electric field is confined to a finite region, like in typical electronic devices. We use a one-dimensional tight-binding model within the single-band approximation to numerically study the dynamics of electrons after a sudden switching-on of the electric field. We find a transition from a regime with direct current to Bloch oscillations when increasing the system size or decreasing the field strength. We propose a pump-probe scheme to observe the oscillations by measuring the accumulated charge as a function of the pulse-length.

References in corpus (3)

• Time-dependent density-functional theory for open systems
• Dynamics of Bloch Oscillations in Disordered Lattice Potentials
• Coherent manipulation of charge qubits in double quantum dots

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Characteristic length scales from entanglement dynamics in electric-field-driven tight-binding chains
• From Bloch Oscillations to a Steady-State Current in Strongly Biased Mesoscopic Devices
• Landauer transport as a quasisteady state on finite chains under unitary quantum dynamics
• Time-dependent framework for energy and charge currents in nanoscale systems
• Unambiguous Simulation of Diffusive Charge Transport in Disordered Nanoribbons