2008/02/20 by Bernd Rosenow
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Charge (physics) #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Condensed matter physics #Conductivity #Electronic and Structural Properties of Oxides #Instanton #Lattice (music) #Mott insulator #Nonlinear system #Optical conductivity #Photon #Photon energy #Physics #Quantum #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Quantum mechanics #Semiclassical physics #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.str-el
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1742-5468/2008/04/p04010
Dedicated to Thomas Nattermann on the occasion of his 60th birthday. To appear in JSTAT. 5 pages, 2 figures
arxiv created 2008/02/20 · openalex publication_date 2008/04/11 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We discuss a semiclassical calculation of low energy charge transport in one-dimensional (1D) insulators with a focus on Mott insulators, whose charge degrees of freedom are gapped due to the combination of short range interactions and a periodic lattice potential. Combining RG and instanton methods, we calculate the nonlinear AC conductivity and interpret the result in terms of multi-photon absorption. We compare the result of the semiclassical calculation for interacting systems to a perturbative, fully quantum mechanical calculation of multi-photon absorption in a 1D band insulator and find good agreement when the number of simultaneously absorbed photons is large.