The influence of short-range Coulomb correlations on the Mott transition in the single-band Hubbard model at half filling is studied within cellular dynamical mean-field theory for square and triangular lattices. Finite-temperature exact diagonalization is used to investigate correlations within two-, three-, and four-site clusters. Transforming the nonlocal self-energy from a site basis to a molecular-orbital basis, we focus on the interorbital charge transfer between these cluster molecular orbitals in the vicinity of the Mott transition. In all cases studied, the charge transfer is found to be small, indicating weak Coulomb-induced orbital polarization despite sizable level splitting between orbitals. These results demonstrate that all cluster molecular orbitals take part in the Mott transition and that the insulating gap opens simultaneously across the entire Fermi surface. Thus, at half filling we do not find orbital-selective Mott transitions or a combination of band filling and Mott transition in different orbitals. Nevertheless, the approach toward the transition differs greatly between cluster orbitals, giving rise to a pronounced momentum variation along the Fermi surface, in agreement with previous works. The near absence of Coulomb-induced orbital polarization in these clusters differs qualitatively from single-site multiorbital studies of several transition-metal oxides, where the Mott phase exhibits nearly complete orbital polarization as a result of a correlation driven enhancement of the crystal-field splitting. The strong single-particle coupling among cluster orbitals in the single-band case is identified as the source of this difference.
We address the nature of the Mott transition in the Hubbard model at half-filling using cluster dynamical mean field theory (DMFT). We compare cluster-DMFT results with those of single-site DMFT. We show that inclusion of the short-range correlations on top of the on-site correlations does not change the order of the transition between the paramagnetic metal and the paramagnetic Mott insulator, which remains first order. However, the short range correlations reduce substantially the critical U and modify the shape of the transition lines. Moreover, they lead to very different physical properties of the metallic and insulating phases near the transition point. Approaching the transition from the metallic side, we find an anomalous metallic state with very low coherence scale. The insulating state is characterized by the narrow Mott gap with pronounced peaks at the gap edge.
The Mott transition in a multiorbital Hubbard model involving subbands of different widths is studied within the dynamical mean-field theory. Using the iterated perturbation theory for the quantum impurity problem it is shown that at low temperatures interorbital Coulomb interactions give rise to a single first-order transition rather than a sequence of orbital selective transitions. Impurity calculations based on the Quantum Monte Carlo method confirm this qualitative behavior. Nevertheless, at finite temperatures, the degree of metallic or insulating behavior of the subbands differs greatly. Thus, on the metallic side of the transition, the narrow band can exhibit quasi-insulating features, whereas on the insulating side the wide band exhibits pronounced bad-metal behavior. This complexity might partly explain contradictory results between several previous works.
We investigate a quarter-filled two-band Hubbard model involving a crystal-field splitting, which lifts the orbital degeneracy as well as an interorbital hopping (interband hybridization). Both terms are relevant to the realistic description of correlated materials such as transition-metal oxides. The nature of the Mott metal-insulator transition is clarified and is found to depend on the magnitude of the crystal-field splitting. At large values of the splitting, a transition from a two-band to a one-band metal is first found as the on-site repulsion is increased and is followed by a Mott transition for the remaining band, which follows the single-band (Brinkman-Rice) scenario well documented previously within dynamical mean-field theory. At small values of the crystal-field splitting, a direct transition from a two-band metal to a Mott insulator with partial orbital polarization is found, which takes place simultaneously for both orbitals. This transition is characterized by a vanishing of the quasiparticle weight for the majority orbital but has a first-order character for the minority orbital. It is pointed out that finite-temperature effects may easily turn the metallic regime into a bad metal close to the orbital polarization transition in the metallic phase.
A slave-spin representation of fermion operators has recently been proposed for the half-filled single and multiband Hubbard model. We show that with the addition of a gauge variable, the formalism can be extended to finite doping. We solve the resulting spin problem using the cluster mean-field approximation. This approximation takes short-range correlations into account by exact diagonalization on the cluster, whereas long-range correlations beyond the size of clusters are treated at the mean-field level. In the limit where the cluster has only one site and the interaction strength
U is infinite, this approach reduces to the Gutzwiller approximation. There are some qualitative differences when the size of the cluster is finite. We first compute the critical
U for the Mott transition as a function of a frustrating nearest-neighbor interaction on lattices relevant for various correlated systems, namely, the cobaltates, the layered organic superconductors and the high-temperature superconductors. For the triangular lattice, we also study the extended Hubbard model with nearest-neighbor repulsion. In addition to a uniform metallic state, we find a $\sqrt{(3)}\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}\sqrt{(3)}$ charge density wave in a broad doping regime, including commensurate ones. We find that in the large
U limit, intersite Coulomb repulsion
V strongly suppresses the single-particle weight of the metallic state.
We formulate a finite-temperature scheme of the variational cluster approximation (VCA) particularly suitable for an exact-diagonalization cluster solver. Based on the analytical properties of the single-particle Green's function matrices, we explicitly show the branch-cut structure of logarithm of the complex determinant functions appearing in the self-energy-functional theory (SFT) and whereby construct an efficient scheme for the finite-temperature VCA. We also derive the explicit formulas for entropy and specific heat within the framework of the SFT. We first apply the method to explore the antiferromagnetic order in a half-filled Hubbard model by calculating the entropy, specific heat, and single-particle excitation spectrum for different values of on-site Coulomb repulsion
U and temperature
T. We also calculate the
T dependence of the single-particle excitation spectrum in the strong coupling region, and discuss the overall similarities to and the fine differences from the spectrum obtained by the spin-density-wave mean-field theory at low temperatures and the Hubbard-I approximation at high temperatures. Moreover, we show a necessary and sufficient condition for the third law of thermodynamics in the SFT. On the basis of the thermodynamic properties, such as the entropy and the double occupancy, calculated via the
T and/or
U derivative of the grand potential, we obtain a crossover diagram in the
(U,T) plane, which separates a Slater-type insulator and a Mott-type insulator. Next, we demonstrate the finite-temperature scheme in the cluster-dynamical-impurity approximation (CDIA), i.e., the VCA with noninteracting bath orbitals attached to each cluster, and study the paramagnetic Mott metal-insulator transition in the half-filled Hubbard model. Formulating the finite-temperature CDIA, we first address a subtle issue regarding the treatment of the artificially introduced bath degrees of freedom which are absent in the originally considered Hubbard model. We then apply the finite-temperature CDIA to calculate the finite-temperature phase diagram in the
(U,T) plane. Metallic, insulating, coexistence, and crossover regions are distinguished from the bath-cluster hybridization-variational-parameter dependence of the grand-potential functional. We find that the Mott transition at low temperatures is discontinuous, and the coexistence region of the metallic and insulating states persists down to zero temperature. The result obtained here by the finite-temperature CDIA is complementary to the previously reported zero-temperature CDIA phase diagram.
We examine whether the Mott transition of a half-filled, two-orbital Hubbard model with unequal bandwidths occurs simultaneously for both bands or whether it is a two-stage process in which the orbital with narrower bandwith localizes first (giving rise to an intermediate ``orbital-selective'' Mott phase). This question is addressed using both dynamical mean-field theory and a representation of fermion operators in terms of slave quantum spins, followed by a mean-field approximation (similar in spirit to a Gutzwiller approximation). In the latter approach, the Mott transition is found to be orbital selective for all values of the Coulomb exchange (Hund) coupling
J when the bandwidth ratio is small and only beyond a critical value of
J when the bandwidth ratio is larger. Dynamical mean-field theory partially confirms these findings, but the intermediate phase at
J=0 is found to differ from a conventional Mott insulator, with spectral weight extending down to arbitrary low energy. Finally, the orbital-selective Mott phase is found, at zero temperature, to be unstable with respect to an interorbital hybridization
V and replaced at small
V by a state with a large effective mass (and a low quasiparticle coherence scale) for the narrower band.