Dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) studies frequently observe a fine structure in the local spectral function of the SU(2) Fermi-Hubbard model at half filling: In the metallic phase close to the Mott transition, subpeaks emerge at the inner edges of the Hubbard bands. Here we demonstrate that these subpeaks originate from the low-energy effective interaction of doublon-holon pairs, by investigating how the correlation functions of doublon and holon operators contribute to the subpeaks. A mean-field analysis of the low-energy effective Hamiltonian provides results consistent with our DMFT calculation using the numerical renormalization group as an impurity solver. In the SU(3) and SU(4) Hubbard models, the subpeaks become more pronounced due to the increased degeneracy of doublon-holon pair excitations.
Dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) studies frequently observe a fine structure in the local spectral function of the SU(2) Fermi-Hubbard model at half filling: In the metallic phase close to the Mott transition, subpeaks emerge at the inner edges of the Hubbard bands. Here we demonstrate that these subpeaks originate from the low-energy effective interaction of doublon-holon pairs, by investigating how the correlation functions of doublon and holon operators contribute to the subpeaks. A mean-field analysis of the low-energy effective Hamiltonian provides results consistent with our DMFT calculation using the numerical renormalization group as an impurity solver. In the SU(3) and SU(4) Hubbard models, the subpeaks become more pronounced due to the increased degeneracy of doublon-holon pair excitations.
We give a self-contained derivation of the low-energy effective interactions of the SU(N) Hubbard model, a multiflavor generalization of the one-band Hubbard model, by using a generalized Schrieffer-Wolff transformation (SWT). The effective interaction of doublons and holons, which has been largely ignored in previous SWT studies (e.g., the $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}J$ model), leads to distinct peaks in the local density of states. As shown by Lee et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 236402 (2017)], this underlying effective doublon-holon interaction explains the numerical observation of the subpeaks at the inner edges of the Hubbard bands in the metallic phase close to the Mott transition.
We study the filling-driven Mott transition involving the metallic and paramagnetic insulating phases in SU(N) Fermi-Hubbard models, using the dynamical mean-field theory and the numerical renormalization group as its impurity solver. The compressibility shows a striking temperature dependence: near the critical end-point temperature, it is strongly enhanced in the metallic phase close to the insulating phase. We demonstrate that this compressibility enhancement is associated with the thermal suppression of the quasiparticle peak in the local spectral functions. We also explain that the asymmetric shape of the quasiparticle peak originates from the asymmetry in the dynamics of the generalized doublons and holons.
Low-energy excitations in correlated electron systems may show intricate behaviors and provide essential insights into the dynamics of quantum states and phase transitions. Here, we study a typical half-filled two-orbital Hubbard model featuring the so-called holon-doublon (HD) low-energy excitations in the orbital-selective Mott phase (OSMP), where the principal form of the low-energy excitations has been considered to be a HD bound state. We employ standard single-site dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT), using NORG as an improved impurity solver to calculate the spectral functions at zero temperature. We show that the HD bound state gives an incomplete or even wrong picture for the low-energy excitations. Instead, the excitations are composed of a Kondo-like state in the wide band and a doublon in the narrow band, termed as interband Kondo-like (IBK) bound states. Remarkably, we find that, as the bandwidths of the two bands approach each other, anomalous IBK bound-state excitations appear in the metallic wide band. Our study provides a new picture for the low-energy excitations in the OSMP.
Dynamics in a triangular-lattice Hubbard model is studied at half filling on the basis of the cluster dynamical mean field theory. Numerical calculations use a solver of the continuous-time quantum Monte Carlo method based on the strong-coupling expansion. We examine the change in the nearest-neighbor dynamical correlations of doublon and holon in the time domain with varying the Coulomb repulsion near the Mott transition. We demonstrate that the nearest-neighbor doublon-holon pair shows a strong attractive correlation, particularly in the insulating phase, while the nearest-neighbor doublon-doublon pair shows a repulsive correlation. Useful information is provided by the trajectories in the complex plane of the dynamical correlation functions. The short-time dynamics of the nearest-neighbor doublon and holon in the metallic phase indicates larger fluctuations than in the insulating phase. Their trajectories in the complex plane show that the short-time dynamics of the doublon-holon pair has an opposite behavior to that of the doublon-doublon pair. We find that their time scale of dynamics can be characterized by the period in which the phase rotates π around the long-time limit in both phases. In the long-time region, fluctuations persist up to a very long time in the metallic phase, while they quickly vanish in the insulating phase.
We calculate and resolve with unprecedented detail the local density of states (DOS) and momentum-dependent spectral functions at zero temperature of one of the key models for strongly correlated electron materials, the degenerate two-orbital Kanamori-Hubbard model, by means of the dynamical mean-field theory, which uses the density matrix renormalization group as the impurity solver. When the system is hole doped and in the presence of a finite interorbital Coulomb interaction, we find the emergence of a novel holon-doublon in-gap subband which is split by the Hund's coupling. We also observe interesting features in the DOS, such as the splitting of the lower Hubbard band into a coherent narrowly dispersing peak around the Fermi energy, and another subband which evolves with the chemical potential. We characterize the main transitions giving rise to each subband by calculating the response functions of specific projected operators and by comparing with the energies in the atomic limit. The detailed results for the spectral functions found in this work pave the way to study with great precision the microscopic quantum behavior in correlated materials.
The Mott metal-insulator transition in the Hubbard model is studied by constructing a dynamical slave-boson mean-field theory in the limit of large lattice coordination number z that incorporates the binding between doubly occupied (doublon) and empty (holon) sites. On the Mott insulating side where all doublons and holons bond in real space into excitonic pairs leading to the charge gap, the theory simplifies considerably to leading order in 1/z and becomes exact on the infinite-z Bethe lattice. An asymptotic solution is obtained for a continuous Mott transition associated with the closing of the charge gap at a critical value of the Hubbard Uc and the corresponding doublon density ndc, hopping ${\ensuremath{\chi}}_{d}^{c}$ and doublon-holon pairing ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}}_{d}^{c}$ amplitudes. We find ${U}_{c}={U}_{\mathrm{BR}}[1\ensuremath{-}2{n}_{d}^{c}\ensuremath{-}\sqrt{z}({\ensuremath{\chi}}_{d}^{c}+{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}}_{d}^{c})]\ensuremath{\simeq}0.8{U}_{\mathrm{BR}}$, where UBR is the critical value for the Brinkman-Rice transition in the Gutzwiller approximation captured in the static mean-field solution of the slave-boson formulation of Kotliar and Ruckenstein. Thus, the Mott transition can be viewed as the quantum correction to the Brinkman-Rice transition due to doublon-holon binding. Quantitative comparisons are made to the results of the dynamical mean-field theory, showing good agreement. In the absence of magnetic order, the Mott insulator is a U(1) quantum spin liquid with nonzero intersite spinon hopping that survives the large-z limit and lifts the 2N-fold degeneracy of the local moments. We show that the spinons are coupled to the doublons/holons by a dissipative compact U(1) gauge field in the deconfined phase, realizing the spin-charge separated gapless spin liquid Mott insulator.