Phonon effects, impact ionization and power conversion in Mott photovoltaic systems

Abstract We analyze the effect of acoustic phonons on the photocurrent and the spectral characteristics of a simplified photovoltaic setup made of Mott insulating layers between two metallic leads with a bias voltage applied between them. We include acoustic phonons via the Migdal approximation and we use real-space Floquet dynamical mean-field theory to address the nonequilibrium Floquet steady-state. The so-called auxiliary master equation approach is employed as impurity solver. We find that impact ionization is only weakly affected by acoustic phonon dissipation at low bias voltages. For higher biases instead, the Hartree shift considerably alters the on-site energies of the Hubbard bands and suppresses the photocurrent for intermediate electron-phonon coupling strengths. Impact ionization processes play a fundamental role in enhancing the electrical output power, which decreases when electron-phonon interaction is considered.