  We study the effect of coupling an electronic reservoir to a Hubbard model
and to a Dimer Hubbard Model.
  This is motivated by recent experiments on the effect of illumination on the
insulator-metal transition in a vanadium oxides and photo-conductive cadmium
sulfide heterostructure. We model the system as an electronic reservoir
hybridized to the correlated system. We assume that the light intensity
controls the hybridization coupling strength. We find that the light intensity
acts similarly as the temperature in the weak interaction regime. This is
consistent with the role played by electronic reservoirs in out-of-equilibrium
systems. In contrast, qualitative differences appear at strong coupling. We
show that modeling the V$_2$O$_3$ compound with a Hubbard model, our results
describe qualitatively well the observed illumination-driven suppression of the
insulator-metal transition. In contrast, in the DHM results fail to capture the
mild suppression observed in the case of VO$_2$. This indicates that the
lattice may play an important role in this case.
