Dielectric Breakdown in a Mott Insulator: Many-body Schwinger-Landau-Zener Mechanism studied with a Generalized Bethe Ansatz

Abstract

The nonadiabatic quantum tunneling picture, which may be called the many-body Schwinger-Landau-Zener mechanism, for the dielectric breakdown of Mott insulators in strong electric fields is studied in the one-dimensional Hubbard model. The tunneling probability is calculated by a metod due to Dykhne-Davis-Pechukas with an analytical continuation of the Bethe-ansatz solution for excited states to a non-Hermitian case. A remarkable agreement with the time-dependent density matrix renormalization group result is obtained.

5 pages, 3 figures, revised