While the Hubbard model is the standard model to study Mott metal-insulator transitions, it is still unclear to what extent it can describe metal-insulator transitions in real solids, where nonlocal Coulomb interactions are always present. By using a variational principle, we clarify this issue for short- and long-range nonlocal Coulomb interactions for half-filled systems on bipartite lattices. We find that repulsive nonlocal interactions generally stabilize the Fermi-liquid regime. The metal-insulator phase boundary is shifted to larger interaction strengths to leading order linearly with nonlocal interactions. Importantly, nonlocal interactions can raise the order of the metal-insulator transition. We present a detailed analysis of how the dimension and geometry of the lattice as well as the temperature determine the critical nonlocal interaction leading to a first-order transition: for systems in more than two dimensions with nonzero density of states at the Fermi energy the critical nonlocal interaction is arbitrarily small; otherwise, it is finite.
While the Hubbard model is the standard model to study Mott metal-insulator transitions, it is still unclear to what extent it can describe metal-insulator transitions in real solids, where nonlocal Coulomb interactions are always present. By using a variational principle, we clarify this issue for short- and long-range nonlocal Coulomb interactions for half-filled systems on bipartite lattices. We find that repulsive nonlocal interactions generally stabilize the Fermi-liquid regime. The metal-insulator phase boundary is shifted to larger interaction strengths to leading order linearly with nonlocal interactions. Importantly, nonlocal interactions can raise the order of the metal-insulator transition. We present a detailed analysis of how the dimension and geometry of the lattice as well as the temperature determine the critical nonlocal interaction leading to a first-order transition: for systems in more than two dimensions with nonzero density of states at the Fermi energy the critical nonlocal interaction is arbitrarily small; otherwise, it is finite.
Using finite-temperature determinantal quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we examine the thermodynamic properties of the extended Hubbard model on the half-filled square lattice in the Slater regime at intermediate coupling. We consider both the case of nearest-neighbor interactions and long-range Coulomb interactions, for coupling strengths in which the presence of nonlocal interactions still allows us to perform sign-problem free quantum Monte Carlo simulations. In particular, we assess a recently proposed scenario from variational calculations in terms of a first-order metal-insulator transition in this interaction regime.
For doped two-dimensional Mott insulators in their normal state, the challenge is to understand the evolution from a conventional metal at high doping to a strongly correlated metal near the Mott insulator at zero doping. To this end, we solve the cellular dynamical mean-field equations for the two-dimensional Hubbard model using a plaquette as the reference quantum impurity model and continuous-time quantum Monte Carlo method as impurity solver. The normal-state phase diagram as a function of interaction strength U, temperature T, and filling n shows that, upon increasing n toward the Mott insulator, there is a surface of first-order transition between two metals at nonzero doping. That surface ends at a finite temperature critical line originating at the half-filled Mott critical point. Associated with this transition, there is a maximum in scattering rate as well as thermodynamic signatures. These findings suggest a new scenario for the normal-state phase diagram of the high temperature superconductors. The criticality surmised in these systems can originate not from a T = 0 quantum critical point, nor from the proximity of a long-range ordered phase, but from a low temperature transition between two types of metals at finite doping. The influence of Mott physics therefore extends well beyond half-filling.
We perform a thorough study of the extended Hubbard model featuring local and nearest-neighbor Coulomb repulsion. Using the dynamical mean-field theory we investigated the zero-temperature phase diagram of this model as a function of the chemical doping. The interplay between local and nonlocal interactions drives a variety of phase transitions connecting two distinct charge-ordered insulators, i.e., half filled and quarter filled, a charge-ordered metal and a Mott-insulating phase. We characterize these transitions and the relative stability of the solutions and we show that the two interactions conspire to stabilize the quarter-filled charge-ordered phase.
We provide solid evidence for the long-standing presumption that model Hamiltonians with short-range interactions faithfully reproduce the physics of the long-range Coulomb interaction in real materials. For this aim, we address a generic Hubbard model that captures the quantum phase transitions between metal, Mott insulator, and charge-density-wave (CDW) insulator, in the absence of Fermi-surface nesting. By comparing the quantum phase diagrams for the 1 / r -Hubbard model on a half-filled chain with nearest-neighbor and 1 / r -long-range interactions, we argue that the inclusion of long-range interactions is not crucial for a proper description of interacting many-electron systems. To this end, we employ the density matrix renormalization group method on finite lattices and antiperiodic boundary conditions to determine the quantum phase transitions between the metallic Luttinger liquid for weak interactions, the Mott-Hubbard insulator for dominant on-site interactions, and the CDW insulator for dominant intersite interactions. The two phase diagrams qualitatively agree inasmuch as the quantum phase transitions are continuous in both cases. Moreover, simple Hartree-Fock theory and the atomic limit provide renormalization factors that allow us to quantitatively map the two phase diagrams onto each other. As a practical advantage, our findings imply that computational efforts can be reduced tremendously by using models with short-range interactions only.
We study the half-filled extended Hubbard model on a two-dimensional square lattice using cluster dynamical mean-field theory on clusters of size 8--20. We show that the model exhibits metallic, Mott-insulating, and charge-ordered phases, and determine the location of the charge-ordering phase-transition line and the properties of the phases as a function of temperature, local interaction, and nearest-neighbor interaction. We find strong nonlocal correlations outside the charge-ordered phase and a pronounced screening effect in the vicinity of the phase transition, where nonlocal interactions push the system towards metallic behavior. In contrast, correlations in the charge-ordered phase are mostly local to the unit cell. Finally, we demonstrate how strong nonlocal electron-electron interactions can increase electron mobility by turning a charge-ordered insulator into a metal. We analyze finite-size effects and the convergence of our data to the thermodynamic limit. Control of all sources of errors allows us to assess the regime of applicability of simpler approximation schemes for systems with nonlocal interactions.
Introduction In this chapter we study metal–insulator transitions which occur due to correlations between the charge carriers. This quantum phase transitions results from the competition between kinetic energy and Coulomb repulsion where the latter has the tendency to localise the electrons. The simplest model which describes this competition is the one-band Hubbard model with its two energy scales, the bandwidth W and the Coulomb repulsion U between electrons of opposite spins on the same site. For a fixed density of electrons, n = 1; as the ratio U/W increases, we expect to find a zero-temperature phase transition from a metallic state to an insulator where the electrons are frozen at the lattice sites. The method employed here to investigate this transition is the Gutzwiller approach (Gutzwiller, 1965). This is a variational method which played an important role in providing a framework for the ideas of Mott on the problem of the metal–insulator transition (Mott, 1974). On the metallic side of the transition, this approach describes a metal with renormalised Fermi liquid parameters, essentially with enhanced effective mass and uniform susceptibility. This is the so-called highly correlated electron gas (Brinkman and Rice, 1970) for which the metal oxide V 2 O 3 is the prototype system. In the insulating side, Gutzwiller's approximation yields a noninteracting system of localised electrons. This insulating phase is incompressible , i.e. has zero compressibility and infinite zero temperature susceptibility. The latter is not a consequence of interactions but simply due to the divergence of the Curie susceptibility, χ ∝ 1 /T , of non-interacting moments at T = 0. Then, in Gutzwiller's approach the transition is from a paramagnetic metal to a paramagnetic insulator. We will continue using the designation Mott transition to describe this type of phase transition where the insulating phase has no long-range magnetic order. In real systems, most frequently, localisation due to interactions is accompanied by the appearance of antiferromagnetic order.