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arXiv:1406.6867 · Physical Review B

Sign structure, electron fractionalization, and emergent gauge description of the Hubbard model

Long Zhang, Zheng-Yu Weng

Published Oct 15, 2014• 21 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The Fermi sign structure plays a crucial role for a Landau's Fermi liquid. In this work, we identify the exact sign structure for the bipartite Hubbard model at an arbitrary strength of the on-site Coulomb repulsion $U$. This general sign structure naturally reproduces the conventional fermion signs in the small $U$ limit, and the phase string signs of the $t\ensuremath{-}J$ model in the large $U$ limit. We focus on the half-filling case as an example to illustrate why such a generic sign structure is important to understand the transition from the weakly correlated Fermi-liquid regime to the strongly correlated Mott regime. In particular, we show that an electron fractionalization scheme with emergent partons and mutual Chern-Simons gauge fields provides a suitable framework to accurately handle the singular sign structure in two dimensions. A ground-state ansatz at half filling with incorporating the sign structure and the specific electron fractionalization is also proposed.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.90.165120

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New Journal of Physics•Apr 9, 2020•17 citations
The Fermi sign structure plays a crucial role for a Landau's Fermi liquid. In this work, we identify the exact sign structure for the bipartite Hubbard model at an arbitrary strength of the on-site Coulomb repulsion UUU. This general sign structure naturally reproduces the conventional fermion signs in the small UUU limit, and the phase string signs of the t\ensuremath−Jt\ensuremath{-}Jt\ensuremath−J model in the large UUU limit. We focus on the half-filling case as an example to illustrate why such a generic sign structure is important to understand the transition from the weakly correlated Fermi-liquid regime to the strongly correlated Mott regime. In particular, we show that an electron fractionalization scheme with emergent partons and mutual Chern-Simons gauge fields provides a suitable framework to accurately handle the singular sign structure in two dimensions. A ground-state ansatz at half filling with incorporating the sign structure and the specific electron fractionalization is also proposed.
The fermion sign plays a dominant role in Fermi liquid theory. However, in Mott insulators, the strong Coulomb interaction suppresses the charge fluctuations and eliminates the fermion signs due to electron permutation. In this article, we first review the phase string theory of the Hubbard model for a bipartite lattice, which unifies the Fermi liquid at weak coupling and the antiferromagnetic Mott insulator at strong coupling. We first derive the exact sign structure of the Hubbard model for an arbitrary Coulomb interaction U. In small U limit, the conventional fermion sign is restored, while at large U limit, it leads to the phase string sign structure of the t-J model. For half filling, we construct an electron fractionalization representation, in which chargons and spinons are coupled to each other via emergent mutual Chern-Simons gauge fields. The corresponding ground state ansatz and low energy effective theory capture the ground state phase diagram of the Hubbard model qualitatively. For weak coupling regime, the Fermi liquid quasiparticle is formed by the bound state of a chargon and a spinon, and the long range phase coherence is determined by the background spin correlation. The Mott transition can be realized either by forming the chargon gap or by condensing the background spinons.
A chiral spin liquid (CSL) phase has been recently reported in the Hubbard model on a triangular lattice. It emerges in an intermediate coupling regime at half-filling, which is sandwiched between a ${120}^{\ensuremath{\circ}}$ antiferromagnetic (AFM) phase and a metallic phase as a function of on-site repulsion UUU. In this work, we examine the mechanism of the CSL and complex phase diagram via analytic analysis and numerical density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) method. First, we identify an exact Berry-phase-like sign structure in the partition function of the model at arbitrary UUU, which is originated from the Fermi sign structure at U=0U=0U=0.The spin and charge degrees of freedom are generally entangled via a singular phase string in such a many-body sign structure. In the large-UUU limit, the suppression of the charge fluctuation at half-filling can render the phase string ineffective, resulting in the AFM order. However, if one precisely switches off such a phase string in the DMRG calculation, the ${120}^{\ensuremath{\circ}}$ AFM is shown to survive all the way down to a much weaker UUU without the emergence of the CSL and metallic phases. It indicates that the phase-string sign structure plays the key role to mediate the mutual interaction between the charge and spin fluctuations, which results in the CSL and metallic phases at finite UUU. General implications for the Mott physics in the Hubbard model will also be discussed.
We discuss the appearance of quantum orders in the Hubbard model for interacting electrons, at half-filling. Such phases do not have local order parameters and need to be characterized by the quantum mechanical properties of their ground state. On one hand, we study the Mott transition from a metal to a spin liquid insulator in two dimensions, of potential relevance to some layered organic compounds. The correlation-driven transition occurs at fixed filling and involves fractionalization of the electron: upon entering the insulator, a Fermi surface of neutral spinons coupled to an internal gauge field emerges. We focus on the transport properties near the quantum critical point and find that the emergent gauge fluctuations play a key role in determining the universal scaling. Second, motivated by a class of three-dimensional transition metal oxides, the pyrochlore iridates, we study the interplay of non-trivial band topology and correlations. Building on the strong spin orbit coupling in these compounds, we construct a general microscopic Hubbard model and determine its mean-field phase diagram, which contains topological insulators, Weyl semimetals, axion insulators and various antiferromagnets. We also discuss the effects many-body correlations on theses phases. We close by examining a fractionalized topological insulator that combines the two main themes of the thesis: fractionalization and non-trivial band topology. Specifically, we study how the two-dimensional protected surface states of a topological Mott insulator interact with a three-dimensional emergent gauge field. Various correlation effects on observables are identified.
The mechanism of superconductivity in a purely interacting electron system has been one of the most challenging issues in condensed matter physics. In the BCS theory, the Landau's Fermi liquid is the ground state of weakly interacting fermions dictated by the fermion sign structure, and the superconducting instability only occurs when an additional pairing force is added. By contrast, as shown by density matrix renormalization group calculation, a quasi-one-dimensional superconducting state (specifically a Luther-Emery state) is an intrinsic ground state of the $t\ensuremath{-}J$ two-leg ladder and four-leg cylinder at finite doping. Such a Luther-Emery state with pairing can be directly turned into a Fermi-gas-like normal state without pairing by merely switching off the phase-string signs hidden in the model via two schemes, which reduce the sign structure to the trivial fermion signs associated with doped holes. It thus demonstrates a new pairing paradigm in a model-doped Mott insulator as due to the generic phase-string sign structure. Finally, as an example, the latter is explicitly shown to lead to a ``stringlike'' pairing force after adiabatically connecting to a strong anisotropic limit of the model.
On some one dimensional (1D) and 2D non-bipartite lattices, from scratch we study both free and Hubbard interacting lattice fermions when there are some magnetic fluxes threaded or appropriate gauge fields coupled. On one hand, we focus on finding out the optimal flux which minimizes the energy of fermions at specific fillings. For spin-1/21/21/2 fermions at half-filling on a ring lattice with an odd number of sites, the optimal flux is determined to be ±π/2\pm{\pi}/2±π/2. We prove this conclusion for Hubbard interacting fermions by means of a generalized reflection positivity technique. It can further lead to some applications towards 2D non-bipartite lattices such as triangle and Kagome. At half-filling the optimal flux pattern on the triangular lattice can be ascertained to be [π/2,π/2][{\pi}/2, {\pi}/2][π/2,π/2]. We find that chirality emerges in these optimal flux states. On the other hand, we verify these conclusions and further study other fillings away from half with the numerical exact diagonalization (ED) method and find that, when it deviates from half-filling, Hubbard interactions can even alter the optimal flux patterns on these lattices. Both in 1D and 2D, numerically observed emergent flux singularities driven by strong Hubbard interactions in the ground states are addressed and interpreted as some non-Fermi liquid (NFL) features.
Abstract We present a T = 0 K renormalization group (RG) phase diagram for the electronic Hubbard model in two dimensions on the square lattice at half filling. The RG procedure treats quantum fluctuations in the single particle occupation number nonperturbatively via the unitarily decoupling of one electronic state at every RG step. The resulting phase diagram thus possesses the quantum fluctuation energy scale (ω) as one of its axes. A relation is derived between ω and the effective temperature scale upto which gapless, as well as emergent gapped phases can be obtained. We find that the normal and insulating phases of the half-filled Hubbard model correspond, for any on-site repulsion, to a marginal Fermi liquid normal phase and a topologically-ordered gapped Mott insulating liquid respectively. The marginal Fermi liquid is found to arise from singular forward scattering in directions normal to the nested Fermi surface, while singular backscattering events lead to Mott liquid state. The transition between these two phases involves passage through a pseudogapped phase bookended by Fermi surface topology-changing Lifshitz transitions. The pseudogap phase is observed to arise from the electronic differentiation encoded within the nested Fermi surface, and involves the gradual gapping of the Fermi surface from antinodes to nodes via charge and spin excitations that are mutually entangled. We obtain effective Hamiltonians for various phases, as well as wavefunctions for the low-energy many-body eigenstates of the Mott liquid. Benchmarking of the ground-state energy per particle and the double-occupancy fraction for the Mott liquid against existing numerical results yields excellent agreement. Presence of a Néel ordering symmetry-breaking perturbation in the RG leads to an antiferromagnetic spin-ordered charge insulating Mott state. Our results thus offer novel insights on a variety of aspects of the Mott–Hubbard problem, and can be extended to the doped system.