We study the Anderson-Hubbard model in the Hartree-Fock approximation and the exact diagonalization under the coexistence of short-range interaction and diagonal disorder. We show that there exist unconventional soft gaps, where the single-particle (SP) density of states (DOS) A follows a scaling in energy E as A(E) proportional, variantexp[-(-gammalog|E-E_{F}|);{d}] irrespective of electron filling and long-range order. Here, d is the spatial dimension, E_{F} the Fermi energy and gamma a nonuniversal constant. We propose a multivalley energy landscape as their origin. Possible experiments to verify the present theory are proposed.
We study the Anderson-Hubbard model in the Hartree-Fock approximation and the exact diagonalization under the coexistence of short-range interaction and diagonal disorder. We show that there exist unconventional soft gaps, where the single-particle (SP) density of states (DOS) A follows a scaling in energy E as A(E) proportional, variantexp[-(-gammalog|E-E_{F}|);{d}] irrespective of electron filling and long-range order. Here, d is the spatial dimension, E_{F} the Fermi energy and gamma a nonuniversal constant. We propose a multivalley energy landscape as their origin. Possible experiments to verify the present theory are proposed.
Interplay of electron correlation and randomness is studied by using the Anderson-Hubbard model within the Hartree-Fock approximation. Under the coexistence of short-range interaction and diagonal disorder, we obtain the ground-state phase diagram in three dimensions, which includes an antiferromagnetic insulator, an antiferromagnetic metal, a paramagnetic insulator (Anderson-localized insulator) and a paramagnetic metal. Although only the short-range interaction is present in this model, we find unconventional soft gaps in the insulating phases irrespective of electron filling, spatial dimensions and long-range order, where the single-particle density of states (DOS) vanishes with a power-law scaling in one dimension (1D) or even faster in two dimensions (2D) and three dimensions (3D) toward the Fermi energy. We call it soft Hubbard gap. Moreover, exact-diagonalization results in 1D support the formation of the soft Hubbard gap beyond the mean-field level. The formation of the soft Hubbard gap cannot be attributed to a conventional theory by Efros and Shklovskii (ES) owing the emergence of soft gaps to the long-range Coulomb interaction. Indeed, based on a picture of multivalley energy landscape, we propose a phenomenological scaling theory, which predicts a scaling of the DOS in perfect agreement with the numerical results. We further discuss a correction of the scaling of the DOS by the long-range part of the Coulomb interaction, which modifies the scaling of Efros and Shklovskii. Furthermore, explicit formulae for the temperature dependence of the DC resistivity via variable-range hopping under the influence of the soft gaps are derived. Finally, we compare the present theory with experimental results of SrRu_{1-x}Ti_xO_3.
We study a three-dimensional Anderson-Hubbard model under the coexistence of short-range interaction and diagonal disorder within the Hartree-Fock approximation. We show that the density of states at the Fermi energy is suppressed in the metallic phases near the metal-insulator transition as a proximity effect of the soft Hubbard gap in the insulating phases. The transition to the insulator is characterized by a vanishing DOS in contrast to formation of a quasiparticle peak at the Fermi energy obtained by the dynamical mean field theory in pure systems. Furthermore, we show that there exist frozen spin moments in the paramagnetic metal.
To expand the framework available for interpreting experiments on disordered strongly correlated systems, and in particular to explore further the strong-coupling zero-bias anomaly found in the Anderson-Hubbard model, we ask how this anomaly responds to the addition of nonlocal electron-electron interactions. We use exact diagonalization to calculate the single-particle density of states of the extended Anderson-Hubbard model. We find that for weak nonlocal interactions the form of the zero-bias anomaly is qualitatively unchanged. The energy scale of the anomaly continues to be set by an effective hopping amplitude renormalized by the nonlocal interaction. At larger values of the nonlocal interaction strength, however, hopping ceases to be a relevant energy scale and higher energy features associated with charge correlations dominate the density of states.
We present a detailed, quantitative study of the competition between interaction- and disorder-induced effects in electronic systems. For this the Hubbard model with diagonal disorder (Anderson-Hubbard model) is investigated analytically and numerically in the limit of infinite spatial dimensions, i.e., within a dynamical mean-field theory, at half-filling. Numerical results are obtained for three different disorder distributions by employing quantum Monte Carlo techniques, which provide an explicit finite-temperature solution of the model in this limit. The magnetic phase diagram is constructed from the zeros of the inverse averaged staggered susceptibility. We find that at low enough temperatures and sufficiently strong interaction there always exists a phase with antiferromagnetic long-range order. A strong coupling anomaly, i.e., an increase of the N\'eel temperature for increasing disorder, is discovered. An explicit explanation is given, which shows that in the case of diagonal disorder this is a generic effect. The existence of metal-insulator transitions is studied by evaluating the averaged compressibility both in the paramagnetic and antiferromagnetic phases. A rich transition scenario, involving metal-insulator and magnetic transitions, is found and its dependence on the choice of the disorder distribution is discussed.
We study the effect of strong correlations on the zero bias anomaly (ZBA) in disordered interacting systems. We focus on the two-dimensional extended Anderson-Hubbard model, which has both on-site and nearest-neighbor interactions on a square lattice. We use a variation of dynamical mean field theory in which the diagonal self-energy is solved self-consistently at each site on the lattice for each realization of the randomly-distributed disorder potential. Since the ZBA occurs in systems with both strong disorder and strong interactions, we use a simplified atomic-limit approximation for the diagonal inelastic self-energy that becomes exact in the large-disorder limit. The off-diagonal self-energy is treated within the Hartree-Fock approximation. The validity of these approximations is discussed in detail. We find that strong correlations have a significant effect on the ZBA at half filling, and enhance the Coulomb gap when the interaction is finite-ranged.
We investigate the inter-play of f-electron band dispersion and inter-f electron interactions on the gap in the one electron density of states (DOS) of the periodic Anderson model. The calculations are based on dynamical mean field theory and the numerical renormalization group method for the model in infinite dimensions. The local f-electron DOS at low energies for the electron-hole symmetric model with interactions is found to have a complete-gap, a pseudo-gap or to be gap-less, whenever these structures occur for the non-interacting model but the parameters that characterize these features are strongly renormalized. As the degree of f-electron dispersion is increased, when there is a complete gap, the many-body renormalization remains almost constant, but in the pseudo-gap case the renormalization increases. We calculate the sizes of gaps both in the local DOS and in the dynamic local susceptibilities. When the gap width is defined by the edges in the spectrum for the complete-gap model, the widths of the indirect gap and the spin gap are equal, independent of the degree of electron correlation. However, if the width is defined as the excitation energy between the peaks in the spectrum, then the ratio of the indirect gap to the spin gap increases and eventually saturates as the correlation increases. The value of this ratio depends on the f-electron band dispersion. We have also investigated the dependence of the shape of the interacting DOS on the f-band filling for different forms of f-band dispersion. When the f-band dispersion is small, the gap structure in the symmetric model vanishes as the filling factor decreases. When the model, including the dispersion, has no gap structure, the filling dependence on the DOS in low energies is similar to that for a single impurity Anderson model. The energy dispersion of the quasi-particle in the range, ε f < ε < ε f + U , is approximately explained by the renormalized band model in the cases of both large and small f-band dispersion.