Wannier-Stark ladders and Stark shifts of excitons in Mott insulators

Abstract

External-field driven energy-level discretization, such as Landau quantization or Stark localization, is one of the most intriguing phenomena in quantum systems. We investigate the emergence of the Wannier-Stark ladder coming from the particle-hole continuum and the Stark shifts of the exciton levels in one-dimensional Mott insulators under the dc electric field. The discretized peak structure in the optical-conductivity spectra newly appears by applying the dc electric field, and the positions of these peaks can be reproduced from the energy levels of a simple effective model in the strong-coupling regime. Our results not only suggest that Mott insulators can serve as a viable platform for Stark discretization, but also pave the way for investigations of dynamical properties in correlated many-body systems under a dc electric field.