Nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory: an auxiliary quantum master equation approach.

We introduce a versatile method to compute electronic steady-state properties of strongly correlated extended quantum systems out of equilibrium. The approach is based on dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT), in which the original system is mapped onto an auxiliary nonequilibrium impurity problem imbedded in a Markovian environment. The steady-state Green's function of the auxiliary system is solved by full diagonalization of the corresponding Lindblad equation. The approach can be regarded as the nontrivial extension of the exact-diagonalization-based DMFT to the nonequilibrium case. As a first application, we consider an interacting Hubbard layer attached to two metallic leads and present results for the steady-state current and the nonequilibrium density of states.