Probing Green's Function Zeros by Cotunneling through Mott Insulators

Quantum tunneling experiments have provided deep insights into basic excitations occurring as Green's function poles in the realm of complex quantum matter. However, strongly correlated quantum materials also allow for Green's functions zeros (GFZs) that may be seen as an antidote to the familiar poles and have so far largely eluded direct experimental study. Here, we propose and investigate theoretically how cotunneling through Mott insulators enables direct access to the shadow band structure of GFZs. In particular, we derive an effective Hamiltonian for the GFZ that is shown to govern the cotunneling amplitude and reveal fingerprints of many-body correlations clearly distinguishing the GFZ structure from the underlying free Bloch band structure of the system. Our perturbative analytical results are corroborated by numerical data in the framework of both exact diagonalization and matrix product state simulations for a one-dimensional model system consisting of a Su-Schrieffer-Heeger-Hubbard model coupled to two single-level quantum dots.