A general understanding of quantum phase transitions in strongly correlated materials is still lacking. By exploiting a cutting-edge quantum many-body approach, the dynamical vertex approximation, we make important progress, determining the quantum critical properties of the antiferromagnetic transition in the fundamental model for correlated electrons, the Hubbard model in three dimensions. In particular, we demonstrate that-in contradiction to the conventional Hertz-Millis-Moriya theory-its quantum critical behavior is driven by the Kohn anomalies of the Fermi surface, even when electronic correlations become strong.
A general understanding of quantum phase transitions in strongly correlated materials is still lacking. By exploiting a cutting-edge quantum many-body approach, the dynamical vertex approximation, we make important progress, determining the quantum critical properties of the antiferromagnetic transition in the fundamental model for correlated electrons, the Hubbard model in three dimensions. In particular, we demonstrate that-in contradiction to the conventional Hertz-Millis-Moriya theory-its quantum critical behavior is driven by the Kohn anomalies of the Fermi surface, even when electronic correlations become strong.
Quantum phase transitions in strongly correlated electron materials are one of the most intriguing phenomena in condensed matter physics. In fact, the rich phase-diagrams of these systems usually allow for the presence of several quantum phase transitions. At the same time, a comprehensive theoretical description of the quantum critical properties of correlated electrons has been not fully developed yet. For one of the most fundamental model in solid state physics, the 3D Hubbard model, quantum critical behaviour appears to violate the conventional Hertz-Millis- Moriya theory. This unexpected finding has been ascribed to the presence of specific features on the Fermi surface (FS), such as Kohn points and/or lines. If this is the case, the correct description of 3D correlated metal should be already accessible by means of Dynamical Mean Field Theory (DMFT) calculations. DMFT, in fact, preserves the information about the FS geometry and correctly captures temporal fluctuations, crucial for the description of quantum criticality. The main aim of this work is to test the hypothesis that DMFT treatment is sufficient to describe the quantum critical behaviour of 3D correlated metals, without resorting to more advanced (and much heavier!) quantum many-body schemes. Our DMFT results for the hole-doped 3D-Hubbard model have allowed to determine the location of the quantum-critical point of the magnetic transition and to highlight promising trends for the associated quantum critical exponents.
We investigate magnetic quantum phase-transitions in bulk correlated metals. To this end, we focus on the Hubbard model on different cubic lattices as a function of temperature and electronic density, determining the relevant regimes around its quantum magnetic transition, i.e. classical, quantum critical, and quantum disordered, as well as the corresponding (thermal/non-thermal) quantum critical exponents. Our numerical results, based on dynamical mean-field theory, together with supporting analytical derivations, rigorously demonstrate how and why the presence of different kinds of Kohn anomalies on the underlying Fermi surface (i) drives the quantum critical behavior above the quantum critical point and (ii) shapes the whole phase diagram around it. Our findings highlight the importance of an explicit inclusion of such Fermi surface geometrical properties into the universality class definition for magnetic quantum phase-transitions in correlated metals.
The study of the Hubbard model in three dimensions contains a variety of phases dependent upon the chosen parameters. This thesis shows that there is the indication of a zero temperature phase transition at a finite doping. The Hubbard model has been used to identify a similar quantum critical point in two dimensions. The presented results continue these investigations. The system demonstrates a strange metal phase at finite temperature which cannot be described in term of the conventional Fermi liquid. While there have been extensive studies over the past three decades for such materials in two dimensions, there are few numerical studies in three dimensions. This study strives to identify the existence of the strange metal beyond two dimensions. In this work we present numerical results based on the dynamical cluster approximation to demonstrate the existence of a strange metal phase in three dimensions.
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.
We revisit an antiferromagnetic quantum phase transition with $\mathbit{Q}=2{\mathbit{k}}_{F}$, where $\mathbit{Q}$ is an ordering wave vector and ${\mathbit{k}}_{F}$ is a Fermi momentum. Reformulating the Hertz-Moriya-Millis theory within the strong-coupling approach to diagonalize the spin-fermion coupling term and performing the scaling analysis for an effective-field theory with quantum corrections in the Eliashberg approximation, we propose an interacting fixed point for this antiferromagnetic quantum phase transition, where antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations become locally critical to interact with renormalized electrons. The emergence of local quantum criticality suggests a mechanism of $\ensuremath{\omega}/T$ scaling for antiferromagnetic quantum criticality, generally forbidden in the context of the Hertz-Moriya-Millis theory.
Almost 50 years after the invention of the Hubbard model [1–3] and despite modern petaflop supercomputers, a precise analysis of the criticality of this most basic model for electronic correlations has not been achieved so far, at least not in three dimensions. Dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) [4–6] was a big step forward to quantitatively calculate the three dimensional Hubbard model since the major contribution of electronic correlations, i.e., the local ones, are well captured within this theory. Local correlations give rise to quasiparticle renormalization, the Mott-Hubbard transition, magnetism, and even more subtle issues such as kinks in a purely electronic models [7]. However, non-local spatial correlations are also naturally generated by a purely local Hubbard interaction, and, as it is well known, they become of essential importance in the vicinity of secondorder phase transitions. As these correlations are neglected in DMFT, this scheme can provide only for a conventional mean-field (MF) description of the critical properties. To overcome this shortcoming cluster extensions to DMFT such as the dynamical cluster approximation (DCA) and cluster-DMFT have been proposed, see Ref. 8 for a review. In these approaches non-local correlations beyond DMFT are taken into account, however only within the range of the cluster size; and due to computational limitations the actual size of the cluster is severely restricted to about 3-5 sites for each direction. Hence, short-range correlations are included by these approaches, whereas long-range ones are not. Nonetheless, Kent et al. [9] were able to extrapolate the cluster size of so-called Betts clusters to infinity, albeit assuming from the very beginning the critical exponents to be those of the Heisenberg model. This way they extrapolated the critical temperature of the paramagnetic-toantiferromagnetic phase transition which was found to be in agreement with earlier quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations of Staudt et al. [10] on finite lattices.