A heterostructure of a semi-infinite metal and a Mott insulator is considered. It is supposed that both materials have an identical lattice spacing and hopping integrals and differ in the Hubbard repulsion, which is negligible in the metal and exceeds the critical value for the Mott transition in the insulator. At half-filling and for low temperatures, the insulator has the long-range antiferromagnetic order. Its low-lying elementary excitations are standing spin waves and a spin-wave mode which is localized near the interface and has a two-dimensional dispersion. This mode ejects bulk modes from the boundary region. The antiferromagnetic ordering of the insulator induces an antiferromagnetic order in the metal where the magnetization decays exponentially with distance from the interface. This decay is characterized by the correlation length equal to 5–6 lattice spacings.
A heterostructure of a semi-infinite metal and a Mott insulator is considered. It is supposed that both materials have an identical lattice spacing and hopping integrals and differ in the Hubbard repulsion, which is negligible in the metal and exceeds the critical value for the Mott transition in the insulator. At half-filling and for low temperatures, the insulator has the long-range antiferromagnetic order. Its low-lying elementary excitations are standing spin waves and a spin-wave mode which is localized near the interface and has a two-dimensional dispersion. This mode ejects bulk modes from the boundary region. The antiferromagnetic ordering of the insulator induces an antiferromagnetic order in the metal where the magnetization decays exponentially with distance from the interface. This decay is characterized by the correlation length equal to 5–6 lattice spacings.
A heterostructure of a semi-infinite metal and a Mott insulator is considered. It is supposed that both materials have an identical lattice spacing and hopping integrals and differ in the Hubbard repulsion which is negligible in the metal and exceeds the critical value for the Mott transition in the insulator. At half-filling and for low temperatures the insulator has long-range antiferromagnetic order. Its low-lying elementary excitations are standing spin waves and a spin-wave mode which is localized near the interface and has a two-dimensional dispersion. This mode ejects bulk modes from the boundary region. The antiferromagnetic ordering of the insulator induces an antiferromagnetic order in the metal where the magnetization decays exponentially with distance from the interface. This decay is characterized by the correlation length of about 6 lattice spacings.
The possibility of novel behavior at interfaces between strongly and weakly correlated materials has come under increased study recently. In this paper, we use determinant quantum Monte Carlo to determine the interpenetration of metallic and Mott-insulator physics across an interface in the two-dimensional Hubbard Hamiltonian. We quantify the behavior of the density of states at the Fermi level and the short- and long-range antiferromagnetism as functions of the distance from the interface and with different interaction strength, temperature, and hopping across the interface. Induced metallic behavior into the insulator is evident over several lattice spacings, whereas antiferromagnetic correlations remain small on the metallic side. At large interface hopping, singlets form between the two boundary layers, shielding the two systems from each other.
We investigate the metal-insulator transition in the half-filled Hubbard model on the two-dimensional triangular lattice using both the Kotliar-Ruckenstein slave-boson technique and an exact numerical diagonalization of finite clusters. Contrary to the case of a square lattice, where a perfect nesting of the Fermi surface leads to a metal-insulator transition at arbitrarily small values of U, always accompanied by antiferromagnetic ordering, on a triangular lattice, due to the lack of perfect nesting, the transition takes place at a finite value of U, and frustration induces a nontrivial competition among different magnetic phases. Indeed, within the mean-field approximation in the slave-boson approach, as the interaction grows the paramagnetic metal turns into a metallic phase with incommensurate spiral ordering. Increasing the interaction further, a linear spin-density wave is stabilized, and finally for strong coupling the latter phase undergoes a first-order transition toward an antiferromagnetic insulator. No trace of the intermediate phases is seen in the exact diagonalization results, indicating a transition between a paramagnetic metal and an antiferromagnetic insulator.
For doped two-dimensional Mott insulators in their normal state, the challenge is to understand the evolution from a conventional metal at high doping to a strongly correlated metal near the Mott insulator at zero doping. To this end, we solve the cellular dynamical mean-field equations for the two-dimensional Hubbard model using a plaquette as the reference quantum impurity model and continuous-time quantum Monte Carlo method as impurity solver. The normal-state phase diagram as a function of interaction strength U, temperature T, and filling n shows that, upon increasing n toward the Mott insulator, there is a surface of first-order transition between two metals at nonzero doping. That surface ends at a finite temperature critical line originating at the half-filled Mott critical point. Associated with this transition, there is a maximum in scattering rate as well as thermodynamic signatures. These findings suggest a new scenario for the normal-state phase diagram of the high temperature superconductors. The criticality surmised in these systems can originate not from a T = 0 quantum critical point, nor from the proximity of a long-range ordered phase, but from a low temperature transition between two types of metals at finite doping. The influence of Mott physics therefore extends well beyond half-filling.
The checkerboard lattice, with alternating 'crossed' plaquettes, serves as the two dimensional analog of the pyrochlore lattice. The corner sharing plaquette structure leads to a hugely degenerate ground state, and no magnetic order, for classical spins with short range antiferromagnetic interaction. For the half-filled Hubbard model on this structure, however, we find that the Mott insulating phase involves virtual electronic processes that generate longer range and multispin couplings. These couplings lift the degeneracy, selecting a 'flux like' state in the Mott insulator. Increasing temperature leads, strangely, to a sharp crossover from this state to a '120 degree' correlated state and then a paramagnet. Decrease in the Hubbard repulsion drives the system towards an insulator-metal transition-the moments reduce, and a spin disordered state wins over the flux state. Near the insulator-metal transition the electron system displays a pseudogap extending over a large temperature window.
We consider a one-dimensional two-band model of electrons on a lattice with equal nearest-neighbour hopping, an interband splitting Delta and a Hubbard-like repulsion U. The model is defined via the SU(4) generalization of Lieb and Wu's Bethe ansatz solution of the one-dimensional Hubbard model. At T=0 the model has a Mott metal-insulator transition at a critical value U c ( Delta ) for a band filling of exactly one electron per site. U c decreases with Delta , being zero if the excited-electron band is empty, and U c =2.981 when the bands are degenerate. We discuss the ground-state properties, the spectrum of elemental excitations, the specific heat and the magnetic susceptibility, in both the metallic and insulating phases, as a function of the crystal-field splitting for exactly one electron per site. There are four branches of elemental excitations: (i) charge excitations, (ii) crystalline-field excitations and (iii) two branches of spin waves. The Fermi velocity is finite in the metallic phase, diverges as the metal-insulator transition is approached from the metallic side and vanishes for the insulator. Each band contributes to the susceptibility with a term that is inversely proportional to the spin-wave velocity for that band. The low-temperature specific heat is proportional to T and to the sum of the inverses of the velocities of the four branches.