Dissipation and geometry in nonlinear quantum transports of multiband electronic systems

Abstract

Nonlinear responses in condensed matters attract recent intensive interest because they provide rich information about the materials and hold the possibility of being applied in diodes or high-frequency optical devices. Nonlinear responses are often closely related to the multiband nature of the system which can be taken into account by the geometric quantities such as the Berry curvature as shown in the nonlinear Hall effect. Theoretically, the semi-classical Boltzmann treatment or the reduced density matrix method have been often employed, in which the effect of dissipation is included through the relaxation time approximation. In the diagrammatic method, the relaxation is treated through the imaginary part of the self-energy of the Green function and the consequent broadening of the spectral function for the integration over the real frequency. Therefore, the poles of the Green function do not play explicit pole when there is finite dissipation. In this paper, in stark contrast to this conventional picture, we show that the poles of the Green function determine mostly the nonlinear response functions with dissipation, which leads to the terms with the Fermi distribution function of complex argument and results in the dissipation-induced geometric term. We elucidate the geometric origin of the nonreciprocal conductivity, which is related to the Berry curvature generalized to the higher derivative. Finally, we derive the analytical results on the geometric terms of the nonlinear conductivities in the type-I and type-II Weyl Hamiltonian to demonstrate their crucial roles.