  Electrons in periodic potentials exhibit oscillatory motion in presence of an
electric field. Such oscillations are known as Bloch oscillations. In this
article we theoretically investigate the emergence of Bloch oscillations for
systems where the electric field is confined to a finite region, like in
typical electronic devices. We use a one-dimensional tight-binding model within
the single-band approximation to numerically study the dynamics of electrons
after a sudden switching-on of the electric field. We find a transition from a
regime with direct current to Bloch oscillations when increasing the system
size or decreasing the field strength. We propose a pump-probe scheme to
observe the oscillations by measuring the accumulated charge as a function of
the pulse-length.
