Floquet non-equilibrium Green’s function and Floquet quantum master equation for electronic transport: The role of electron–electron interactions and spin current with circular light

Abstract

The non-equilibrium Green’s function (NEGF) and quantum master equation (QME) are two main classes of approaches for electronic transport. We discuss various Floquet variances of these formalisms for transport properties of a quantum dot driven via interaction with an external periodic field. We first derived two versions of the Floquet NEGF. We also explore an ansatz of the Floquet NEGF formalism for the interacting systems. In addition, we derived two versions of Floquet QME in the weak interaction regime. With each method, we elaborate on the evaluation of the expectation values of the number and current operators. We examined these methods for transport through a two-level system that is subject to periodic driving. The numerical results of all four methods show good agreement for non-interacting systems in the weak regime. Furthermore, we have observed that circular light can introduce spin current. We expect these Floquet quantum transport methods to be useful in studying molecular junctions exposed to light.