We investigate the effect of local electron-phonon coupling on nonlinear optical conductivity in an interacting ferroelectric system. Using real-time simulations, we show an enhancement in nonlinear conductivity under linearly-polarized light due to generation of the phonon-assisted ballistic-current in addition to the injection-current generated by electron-hole pairs. The optically excited phonon modes generate an asymmetric carrier distribution that causes a strong directional ballistic-current. The ballistic-current enhances the photocurrent several times at above band-gap excitation frequencies and is sublinearly dependent on the excitation intensity. This strong phonon-assisted zero-frequency directional ballistic-current demonstrates an alternative way to boost the bulk photovoltaic effect (BPVE) in electronic ferroelectric materials with strong local electron-phonon coupling.
@article{arxiv.2208.09545,
title = {Ballistic photocurrent driven by optical phonon modes in a polaronic ferroelectric},
author = {Sangeeta Rajpurohit and Tadashi Ogitsu and Liang Z. Tan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.09545},
year = {2022}
}