Breakdown of a Mott insulator: A nonadiabatic tunneling mechanism

Time-dependent nonequilibrium properties of a strongly correlated electron system driven by large electric fields is obtained by means of solving the time-dependent Schrodinger equation for the many-body wave function numerically in one dimension. While the insulator-to-metal transition depends on the electric field and the interaction, the metallization is found to be described in terms of a universal Landau-Zener quantum tunneling among the many-body levels. These processes induce current oscillation for small systems, while giving rise to finite resistivity through dissipation for larger systems/on longer time scales.