A comparative study of nonequilibrium insulator-to-metal transitions in electron-phonon systems

Abstract

We study equilibrium and nonequilibrium properties of electron-phonon systems described by the Hubbard-Holstein model using the dynamical mean-field theory. In equilibrium, we benchmark the results for impurity solvers based on the one-crossing approximation and slave-rotor approximation against non-perturbative numerical renormalization group reference data. We also examine how well the low energy properties of the electron-boson coupled systems can be reproduced by an effective static electron-electron interaction. The one-crossing and slave-rotor approximations are then used to simulate insulator-to-metal transitions induced by a sudden switch-on of the electron-phonon interaction. The slave-rotor results suggest the existence of a critical electron-phonon coupling above which the system is transiently trapped in a non-thermal metallic state with coherent quasiparticles. The same quench protocol in the one-crossing approximation results in a bad metallic state.