Many-body effects on high-harmonic generation in Hubbard ladders

We show how many-body effects associated with background spin dynamics control the high-harmonic generation (HHG) in Mott insulators by analyzing the two-leg ladder Hubbard model. Spin dynamics activated by the interchain hopping $t_y$ drastically modifies the HHG features. When two chains are decoupled ($t_y=0$), HHG originates from the dynamics of coherent doublon-holon pairs because of spin-charge separation. With increasing $t_y$, the doublon-holon pairs lose their coherence due to their interchain hopping and resultant spin-strings. Furthermore, the HHG signal from spin-polarons – charges dressed by spin clouds – leads to an additional plateau in the HHG spectrum. For large $t_y$, we identify unconventional HHG processes involving $three$ elementary excitations – two polarons and one magnon. Our results demonstrate the nontrivial nature of HHG in strongly correlated systems, and its qualitative differences to conventional semiconductors.