  In this work, the nonlinear optical response, and in particular, the high
harmonic generation of semiconductors is addressed by using the Wannier gauge.
One of the main problems in the time evolution of the Semiconductor Bloch
equations resides in the fact that the dipole couplings between different bands
can diverge and have a random phase along the reciprocal space and this leads
to numerical instability. To address this problem, we propose the use of the
Maximally Localized Wannier functions that provide a framework to map ab-initio
calculations to an effective tight-binding Hamiltonian with great accuracy. We
show that working in the Wannier gauge, the basis set in which the Bloch
functions are constructed directly from the Wannier functions, the dipole
couplings become smooth along the reciprocal space thus avoiding the problem of
random phases. High harmonic generation spectrum is computed for a 2D monolayer
of hBN as a numerical demonstration.
