Disorder or sufficiently strong interactions can render a metallic state unstable, causing it to turn into an insulating one. Despite the fact that the interplay of these two routes to a vanishing conductivity has been a central research topic, a unifying picture has not emerged so far. Here, we establish that the two-dimensional Falicov-Kimball model, one of the simplest lattice models of strong electron correlation, does allow for the study of this interplay. In particular, we show that this model at particle-hole symmetry possesses three distinct thermodynamic insulating phases and exhibits Anderson localization. The previously reported metallic phase is identified as a finite-size feature due to the presence of weak localization. We characterize these phases by their electronic density of states, staggered occupation, conductivity, and the generalized inverse participation ratio. The implications of our findings for other strongly correlated systems are discussed.
Disorder or sufficiently strong interactions can render a metallic state unstable, causing it to turn into an insulating one. Despite the fact that the interplay of these two routes to a vanishing conductivity has been a central research topic, a unifying picture has not emerged so far. Here, we establish that the two-dimensional Falicov-Kimball model, one of the simplest lattice models of strong electron correlation, does allow for the study of this interplay. In particular, we show that this model at particle-hole symmetry possesses three distinct thermodynamic insulating phases and exhibits Anderson localization. The previously reported metallic phase is identified as a finite-size feature due to the presence of weak localization. We characterize these phases by their electronic density of states, staggered occupation, conductivity, and the generalized inverse participation ratio. The implications of our findings for other strongly correlated systems are discussed.
We study the interplay of disorder localization and strong local interactions within the Anderson-Hubbard model. Taking into account local Mott-Hubbard physics and static screening of the disorder potential, the system is mapped onto an effective single-particle Anderson model, which is studied within the self-consistent theory of electron localization. For fermions, we find rich nonmonotonic behavior of the localization length ξ, particularly in two-dimensional systems, including an interaction-induced exponential enhancement of ξ for small and intermediate disorders and a strong reduction of ξ due to hopping suppression by strong interactions. In three dimensions, we identify for half filling a Mott-Hubbard-assisted Anderson localized phase existing between the metallic and the Mott-Hubbardgapped phases. For small U there is re-entrant behavior from the Anderson localized phase to the metallic phase. For bosons, the unrestricted particle occupation number per lattice site yields a monotonic enhancement of ξ as a function of decreasing interaction, which we assume to persist until the superfluid Bose- Einstein condensate phase is entered. Besides, we study cold atomic gases expanding, by a diffusion process, in a weak random potential. We show that the density-density correlation function of the expanding gas is strongly affected by disorder and we estimate the typical size of a speckle spot, i.e., a region of enhanced or depleted density. Both a Fermi gas and a Bose-Einstein condensate (in a mean-field approach) are considered.
Using exact quantum Monte Carlo calculations, we examine the interplay between localization of electronic states driven by many-body correlations and that by randomness in a two-dimensional system featuring linearly vanishing density of states at the Fermi level. A novel disorder-induced nonmagnetic insulating phase is found to emerge from the zero-temperature quantum critical point separating a semimetal and a Mott insulator. Within this phase, a phase transition from a gapless Anderson-like insulator to a gapped Mott-like insulator is identified. Implications of the phase diagram are also discussed.
In this thesis we consider a variational wave function approach as a possible route to describe the competition between disorder and strong electron-electron interaction in two dimensions. In particular we aim to obtain a transparent and physically intuitive understanding of the competition between these two localizing forces within the simplest model where they both are active, namely the disordered Hubbard model at half filling and in a square lattice. Our approach is based on an approximate form of the ground-state wave function, which we believe contains the physically relevant ingredients for a correct description of both the Mott and the Anderson insulators, where electrons are localized by the Coulomb repulsion and by disorder, respectively. For strongly interacting fermionic systems, a standard variational wave function is constructed by a correlation term acting on a Slater determinant, the latter being an uncorrelated metallic state. Previous variational calculations showed that a long-range density-density correlation factor, so called Jastrow factor, is needed to correctly describe the Mott insulator [9]. This term, which is collective by definition, correlates spatially charge uctuations, thus preventing their free motion that would otherwise imply metallic conductance. For this reason, our variational wave function does include such a term. Anderson localization is instead mostly a matter of single-particle wave functions, hence it pertains to the uncorrelated Slater determinant which the Jastrow factor acts onto. We consider both the case in which we enforce paramagnetism in the wave function and the case in which we allow for magnetic ordering. Summarizing briefly our results, we find that, when the variational wave function is forced to be paramagnetic, the Anderson insulator to Mott insulator transition is continuous. This transition can be captured by studying several quantities. In particular, a novel one that we have identified and that is easily accessible variationally is the disconnected density-density fluctuation at long wavelength, defined by lim where ^nq is the Fourier transform of the charge density at momentum q, (...) denotes quantum average at fixed disorder and the overbar represents the average over disorder configurations. We find that Ndisc q!0 is everywhere finite in the Anderson insulator and vanishes critically at the Mott transition, staying zero in the Mott insulator. When magnetism is allowed and the hopping only connects nearest neighbor sites, upon increasing interaction the paramagnetic Anderson insulator first turns antiferromagnetic and finally the magnetic and compressible Anderson insulator gives way to an incompressible antiferromagnetic Mott insulator. The optimized uncorrelated Slater determinant is always found to be the eigenstate of a disordered non-interacting effective Hamiltonian, which suggests that the model is never metallic. Finally, when magnetism is frustrated by a next to nearest neighbor hopping, the overall sequence of phases does not change. However, the paramagnetic to magnetic transition within the Anderson insulator basin of stability turns first order. Indeed, within the magnetically ordered phase, we find many almost degenerate paramagnetic states with well defined local moments. This is suggestive of an emerging glassy behavior when the competition between disorder and strong correlation is maximum.
Disorder or interactions can turn metals into insulators. One of the simplest settings in which to study this physics is given by the Falikov-Kimball (FK) model, which describes itinerant fermions interacting with a classical Ising background field. Despite the translational invariance of the model, inhomogeneous configurations of the background field give rise to effective disorder physics which lead to a rich phase diagram in two (or more) dimensions with finite-temperature charge-density wave (CDW) transitions and interaction-tuned Anderson versus Mott localized phases. Here, we propose a generalized FK model in one dimension with long-range interactions which shows a similarly rich phase diagram. We use an exact Markov chain Monte Carlo method to map the phase diagram and compute the energy-resolved localization properties of the fermions. We compare the behavior of this transitionally invariant model to an Anderson model of uncorrelated binary disorder about a background CDW field which confirms that the fermionic sector only fully localizes for very large system sizes.
The phase diagram of correlated, disordered electron systems is calculated within dynamical mean-field theory using the H\"older mean local density of states. A critical disorder strength is determined in the Anderson-Falicov-Kimball model, and the arithmetic and the geometric averages are found to be just particular means used, respectively, to detect or not the Anderson localization. Correlated metal, Mott insulator, and Anderson insulator phases, as well as coexistence and crossover regimes, are analyzed in this perspective.
In this work, we study the Anderson-Falicov-Kimball model within the dynamical mean field theory for the Bethe lattice, restricting our analysis to the nonmagnetic case. The one-particle density of states is obtained by both arithmetic and geometric averages over disorder, since only the latter can detect localization in the absence of an energy gap. Varying the strengths of Coulomb interaction and disorder at zero temperature, we construct phase diagrams for this model, where we distinguish spectral regions with localized states, with extended states, or with a correlation-induced gap. With this, we identify metal-insulator transitions driven by correlation and disorder, as well as the competition between these effects. This is done for various band fillings, since our main interest here is to study how the variation of the electron density affects the phase diagrams previously obtained for half-filling. The picture revealed by the density of states is further checked by evaluating the static and dynamic conductivities, including temperature effects.