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arXiv:1607.00761 · Physical Review Letters

Fate of Spinons at the Mott Point

Tsung-Han Lee, Serge Florens, V. Dobrosavljević

Published Sep 20, 2016• 12 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Gapless spin liquids have recently been observed in several frustrated Mott insulators, with elementary spin excitations-"spinons"-reminiscent of degenerate Fermi systems. However, their precise role at the Mott point, where charge fluctuations begin to proliferate, remains controversial and ill understood. Here we present the simplest theoretical framework that treats the dynamics of emergent spin and charge excitations on the same footing, providing a new physical picture of the Mott metal-to-insulator transition at half filing. We identify a generic orthogonality mechanism leading to strong damping of spinons, arising as soon as the Mott gap closes. Our results indicate that spinons should not play a significant role within the high-temperature quantum critical regime above the Mott point-in striking agreement with all available experiments.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.117.136601

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Gapless spin liquids have recently been observed in several frustrated Mott insulators, with elementary spin excitations-"spinons"-reminiscent of degenerate Fermi systems. However, their precise role at the Mott point, where charge fluctuations begin to proliferate, remains controversial and ill understood. Here we present the simplest theoretical framework that treats the dynamics of emergent spin and charge excitations on the same footing, providing a new physical picture of the Mott metal-to-insulator transition at half filing. We identify a generic orthogonality mechanism leading to strong damping of spinons, arising as soon as the Mott gap closes. Our results indicate that spinons should not play a significant role within the high-temperature quantum critical regime above the Mott point-in striking agreement with all available experiments.
Resorting to a recently developed theoretical device called dimensional regularization for quantum criticality with a Fermi surface, we examine a metal-insulator quantum phase transition from a Landau's Fermi-liquid state to a U(1) spin-liquid phase with a spinon Fermi surface in two dimensions. Unfortunately, we fail to approach the spin-liquid Mott quantum critical point from the U(1) spin-liquid state within the dimensional regularization technique. Self-interactions between charge fluctuations called holons are not screened, which shows a run-away renormalization group flow, interpreted as holons remain gapped. This leads us to consider another fixed point, where the spinon Fermi surface can be destabilized across the Mott transition. Based on this conjecture, we reveal the nature of the spin-liquid Mott quantum critical point: Dimensional reduction to one dimension occurs for spin dynamics described by spinons. As a result, Landau damping for both spin and charge dynamics disappear in the vicinity of the Mott quantum critical point. When the flavor number of holons is over its critical value, an interacting fixed point appears to be identified with an inverted XYXYXY universality class, controlled within the dimensional regularization technique. On the other hand, a fluctuation-driven first order metal-insulator transition results when it is below the critical number. We propose that the destabilization of a spinon Fermi surface and the emergence of one-dimensional spin dynamics near the spin-liquid Mott quantum critical point can be checked out by spin susceptibility with a 2kF2{k}_{F}2kF​ transfer momentum, where kF{k}_{F}kF​ is a Fermi momentum in the U(1) spin-liquid state: The absence of Landau damping in U(1) gauge fluctuations gives rise to a divergent behavior at zero temperature while it vanishes in the presence of a spinon Fermi surface.
Emergence of localized magnetic moments in the vicinity of a metal-insulator transition is a non-perturbative phenomenon beyond the description based on the perturbative theoretical framework. Resorting to a recently developed theoretical device called dimensional regularization for the Fermi-surface problem, we examine a metal-insulator quantum phase transition from a Landau's Fermi-liquid state to a U(1) spin-liquid phase with a spinon Fermi surface in two dimensions. Assuming that the spinon Fermi surface can be destabilized across the spin-liquid Mott quantum critical point, we show that such itinerant spinons become localized to result in localized magnetic moments near the spin-liquid Mott quantum critical point. The role of such emergent moments in non-Fermi liquid physics reveals the nature of spin-liquid Mott quantum criticality as novel local quantum criticality, where critical charge dynamics belongs to the inverted XY universality class and critical spin dynamics conforms to a locally critical universality class.
We present a theoretical approach to describing the Mott transition of electrons on a two-dimensional lattice that begins with the low-energy effective theory of the Fermi liquid. The approach to the Mott transition must be characterized by the suppression of density and current fluctuations that correspond to specific shape deformations of the Fermi surface. We explore the nature of the Mott insulator and the corresponding Mott transition when these shape fluctuations of the Fermi surface are suppressed without making any a priori assumptions about other Fermi surface shape fluctuations. Building on insights from the theory of the Mott transition of bosons, we implement this suppression by identifying and condensing vortex degrees of freedom in the phase of the low-energy electron operator. We show that the resulting Mott insulator is a quantum spin liquid with a spinon Fermi surface coupled to a U(1)U(1)U(1) gauge field, which is usually described within a slave particle formulation. Our approach thus provides a coarse-grained treatment of the Mott transition and the proximate spin liquid that is nevertheless equivalent to the standard slave particle construction. This alternate point of view provides further insight into the novel physics of the Mott transition and the spin liquid state that is potentially useful. We describe a generalization that suppresses spin antisymmetric fluctuations of the Fermi surface that leads to a spin-gapped charge metal previously also discussed in terms of slave particle constructions.
The Mott insulator is the quintessential strongly correlated electronic state. We obtain complete insight into the physics of the two-dimensional Mott insulator by extending the slave-fermion (holon-doublon) description to finite temperatures. We first benchmark its predictions against state-of-the-art quantum Monte Carlo simulations, demonstrating quantitative agreement. Qualitatively, the short-ranged spin fluctuations both induce holon-doublon bound states and renormalize the charge sector to form the Hubbard bands. The Mott gap is understood as the charge gap renormalized downward by these spin fluctuations. As temperature increases, the Mott gap closes before the charge gap, causing a pseudogap regime to appear naturally during the melting of the Mott insulator.
The pseudogap phase is considered to be a new state of matter in the phase string model of the doped Mott insulator, which is composed of two distinct regimes known as the upper and lower pseudogap phases, respectively. The former corresponds to the formation of spin-singlet pairing, the magnetic characterizations of which have been recently studied [Phys. Rev. B 72, 104520 (2005)]. The latter, as a low-temperature regime of the pseudogap phase, is systematically explored in this work, which is characterized by the formation of the Cooper pair amplitude and described by a generalized Ginzburg-Landau theory. Elementary excitation in this phase is a charge-neutral object carrying spin-1∕21∕21∕2 and locking with a supercurrent vortex, known as a spinon-vortex composite. Such a lower pseudogap phase can be regarded as a vortex liquid state due to the presence of free spinon vortices. Here thermally excited spinon vortices destroy the phase coherence and are responsible for the nontrivial Nernst effect and diamagnetism. The transport entropy and core energy associated with a spinon vortex are determined by the spin degrees of freedom. Such a spontaneous vortex liquid phase can be also considered as a spin liquid with a finite correlation length and gaped S=1∕2S=1∕2S=1∕2 excitations, where a resonancelike nonpropagating spin mode emerges at the antiferromagnetic wavevector $(\ensuremath{\pi},\ensuremath{\pi})$ with a doping-dependent characteristic energy. The superconducting phase is closely related to the lower pseudogap phase by a topological transition with spinon vortices and antivortices forming bound pairs and the emergence of fermionic quasiparticles as holon-spinon-vortex bound objects. A quantitative phase diagram in the parameter space of doping, temperature, and magnetic field is determined. Comparisons with experiments are also made.
Spin and charge are two fundamental degrees of freedom in strongly correlated electron systems. In this thesis we study low-energy effective theory and phase transitions of spin and charge in a variety of strongly correlated systems. First, we study effective theory of magnetic phase transition in Sp(4) spin system and iron-based superconductors. Quantum phase transitions beyond Landau paradigm has been proposed in SU(2) spill model. We generalize this paradigm to Sp(4) model, which can be realized using spin-[special characters omitted] cold atoms on optical lattice. In iron-based superconductors, we study low-energy effective theory for magnetic and structural phase transitions, and present a global phase diagram of the two phase transitions. Second, we study spin and charge fluctuations on triangular lattice, and compare our results with experiments on organic Mott insulator κ-(ET) 2(CN)2. We show that the spin liquid state observed in experiments can be explained by Z2 spin liquid theory which contains spin-½ spinon and Z2 vison excitations. We also argue that near the Mott-insulator-to-metal transition there are fractionalized spinless charge excitations, which form exciton bound states near the transition. At last, we study spin and charge excitations in high-T c cuprates. We describe fluctuating two-dimensional metallic antiferromagnets by a gauge-theoretic description of an 'algebraic charge liquid' involving spinless fermions and a spin S = 1/2 complex scalar. We propose a phenomenological effective lattice Hamiltonian which describes the binding of these particles into gauge-neutral, electron-like excitations, and describe its implications for the electron spectral function across the entire Brillouin zone. We discuss connections of our results to photoemission experiments in the pseudogap regime of the cuprate superconductors.