Role of impact ionization in the thermalization of photo-excited Mott insulators

Abstract

We study the influence of the pulse energy and fluence on the thermalization of photo-doped Mott insulators. If the Mott gap is smaller than the width of the Hubbard bands, the kinetic energy of individual carriers can be large enough to produce doublon-hole pairs via a process analogous to impact ionization. The thermalization dynamics, which involves an adjustment of the doublon and hole densities, thus changes as a function of the energy of the photo-doped carriers and exhibits two timescales -- a fast relaxation related to impact ionization and a slower timescale associated with higher-order scattering processes. The slow dynamics depends more strongly on the gap size and the photo-doping concentration.