The nonlinear response of a material to a large electric field (steady or pulsed) often determines the ultimate performance of the material for electronics applications. The formalism for understanding nonlinear effects in conventional semiconductors is well understood. The formalism is less well developed for so-called "smart" materials that are tuned to lie close to the metalinsulator transition. Here we show that the nonlinear response of a strongly correlated electronic material can be calculated with a massively parallel algorithm by discretizing a continuous matrix operator on the Kadanoff-Baym contour in real time. We benchmark the technique by examining the solutions when the field vanishes and comparing the results to exact results from an equilibrium formalism. We briefly discuss the numerical issues associated with the case of a large electric field and present results that show how the Bloch oscillations become damped as the scattering due to electron correlations increases.

We generalize the many-body formalism for the Peltier effect to the nonlinear/nonequilibrium regime corresponding to large amplitude (spatially uniform but time-dependent) electric fields. We find a relationship between the expectation values for the charge current and for the part of the heat current that reduces to the Jonson-Mahan theorem in the linear-response regime. The nonlinear-response Peltier effect has an extra term in the heat current that is related to Joule heating (we are unable to fully analyze this term). The formalism holds in all dimensions and for arbitrary many-body systems that have local interactions. We illustrate it for the Falicov-Kimball, Hubbard, and periodic Anderson models.