Nonequilibrium steady-state theory of photodoped Mott insulators

Abstract

Photodoped states are widely observed in laser-excited Mott insulators, in which charge excitations are quickly created and can exist beyond the duration of the external driving. Despite the fruitful experimental explorations, theoretical studies on the microscopic models face the challenge to simultaneously deal with exponentially separated time scales, especially in multi-band systems, where the long-time behaviors are often well beyond the reach of state-of-the-art numerical tools. Here, we address this difficulty by introducing a steady-state description of photodoped Mott insulators using an open-system setup, where the photodoped system is stabilized as a non-equilirium steady-state (NESS) by a weak external driving. Taking advantage of the stationarity, we implement and discuss the details of an efficient numerical tool using the steady-state Dynamical Mean-Field Theory (DMFT), combined with the non-crossing approximation (NCA). We demonstrate that these stationary photodoped states exhibit the same properties of their transient counterparts, while being solvable with reasonable computational efforts. Furthermore, they can be parametrized by just few physical quantities, including the effective temperature and the density of charge excitations, which confirms the universal nature of photodoped states indeed independent of the excitation protocols. As a first application, we consider the stationary photodoped states in a two-band Hubbard model with intertwined spin-and-orbital ordering and find a family of hidden phases unknown from the previous studies, implying an apparently unexplored time regime of the relaxation of the intertwined orders.