Nonlinear excitations in one-dimensional correlated insulators

In this work we investigate charge transport in one-dimensional (1D) insulators via semi-classical and perturbative renormalization group (RG) methods. We consider the problem of electron-electron, electron-phonon and electron-two-level system interactions. We show that non-linear collective modes such as polarons and solitons are reponsible for transport. We find a new excitation in the Mott insulator: the polaronic soliton. We discuss the differences between band and Mott insulators in terms of their spin spectrum and obtain the charge and spin gaps in each one of these systems. We show that electron-electron interactions provide strong renormalizations of the energy scales in the problem.