Integrable Mott insulators driven by finite electric field

Abstract

We develop a method for extracting the steady nonequilibrium current from studies of driven isolated systems, applying it to the model of one-dimensional Mott insulator at high temperatures. While in the nonintegrable model the nonequilibrium conditions can be accounted by internal heating, the integrability leads to a strongly nonlinear dc response with vanishingly small dc conductivity in the linear--response regime. The finding is consistent with equilibrium results for dc limit of the optical conductivity determined in the presence of a weak and decreasing perturbation.