Journal
PHYSICAL REVIEW B
Volume 98, Issue 3, Pages -Publisher
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.98.035145
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Funding
- National Science Foundation [DMR-1733071]
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We investigate the quantum mechanical origin of resistive phase transitions in solids driven by a constant electric field in the vicinity of a metal-insulator transition. We perform a nonequilibrium mean-field analysis of a driven-dissipative symmetry-broken insulator, which we solve analytically for the most part. We find that the insulator-to-metal transition (IMT) and the metal-to-insulator transition (MIT) proceed by two distinct electronic mechanisms: Landau-Zener processes and the destabilization of the metallic state by Joule heating, respectively. However, we show that both regimes can be unified in a common effective thermal description, where the effective temperature T-eff depends on the state of the system. This explains recent experimental measurements in which the hot-electron temperature at the IMT was found to match the equilibrium transition temperature. Our analytic approach enables us to formulate testable predictions on the nonanalytic behavior of I-V relation near the insulator-to-metal transition. Building on these successes, we propose an effective Ginzburg-Landau theory which paves the way to incorporating spatial fluctuations and to bringing the theory closer to a realistic description of the resistive switchings in correlated materials.
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