Spatial behavior in a Mott insulator near the voltage-driven resistive transition

Abstract

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 $V\to V_c$. 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.

arXiv comment12 pages, 9 figures

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Correlated Insulator Collapse due to Quantum Avalanche via In-Gap Ladder States
• Spatio-temporal dynamics of voltage-induced resistance transition in the double-exchange model
• Nonequilibrium thermal state of a voltage-biased Mott insulator