Giant rectification in strongly-interacting boundary-driven tilted systems

Correlated quantum systems feature a wide range of nontrivial effects emerging from interactions between their constituting particles. In nonequilibrium scenarios, these manifest in phenomena such as many-body insulating states and anomalous scaling laws of currents of conserved quantities, key for applications in quantum circuit technologies. In this work [1] we propose a giant rectification scheme based on the asymmetric interplay between two ingredients that lead to insulating configurations on their own, namely strong particle interactions and a tilted potential. Based on exact and tensor network simulations, and on perturbative calculations, we show that while for reverse bias both terms cooperate and induce a strengthened insulator with exponentially suppressed current, for forward conduction they compete and generate current resonances; this results in rectification coefficients of many orders of magnitude. We uncover the mechanism underlying these resonances as enhanced coherences between energy eigenstates occurring at avoided crossings in the system's energy spectrum. Our proposal paves the way for implementing a perfect diode in currently-available quantum simulation platforms.

[1] J.J. Mendoza-Arenas and S.R. Clark, arXiv:2209.11718 (2022).