We show that the competition between the fermi liquidity and the gap generation, which is the physics of the Hubbard model, can be realized in a canonical holographic model of a fermion with bulk mass and a dipole interaction. The bulk mass near 1/2 tends to protect the fermi liquidity while large dipole coupling attempts to generate the mass gap so that the model is equipped with the basic mechanism of the Mott transition and expected to play the role of Hubbard model in holographic context. In fact, the spectral densities of the holographic model agree with the dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) calculation in two features: the 'three peaks' and 'the transfer' of the degree of freedom from the quasi-particle peak to the side peak. The phase diagram of our holographic model contains six phases including bad metals and pseudo-gap as well as the Fermi liquid and Mott insulator, and a line connecting the last two defines a Holographic version of Hubbard model. The experimental data for spectral densities of Vanadium Oxide materials seem to be well fit by our theory.
We show that the competition between the fermi liquidity and the gap generation, which is the physics of the Hubbard model, can be realized in a canonical holographic model of a fermion with bulk mass and a dipole interaction. The bulk mass near 1/2 tends to protect the fermi liquidity while large dipole coupling attempts to generate the mass gap so that the model is equipped with the basic mechanism of the Mott transition and expected to play the role of Hubbard model in holographic context. In fact, the spectral densities of the holographic model agree with the dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) calculation in two features: the 'three peaks' and 'the transfer' of the degree of freedom from the quasi-particle peak to the side peak. The phase diagram of our holographic model contains six phases including bad metals and pseudo-gap as well as the Fermi liquid and Mott insulator, and a line connecting the last two defines a Holographic version of Hubbard model. The experimental data for spectral densities of Vanadium Oxide materials seem to be well fit by our theory.
Abstract: The metal–insulator transition (MIT) constitutes one of the most profound and persistent problems in condensed matter physics, sitting at the intersection of electronic structure theory, many-body physics, and emergent quantum phenomena. Conventional band theory, which successfully classifies materials as metals or insulators according to the filling of their electronic bands, fails dramatically when confronted with a class of compounds transition metal oxides chief among them that ought to be metallic by band-counting arguments yet are robustly insulating in the laboratory. The resolution of this paradox required abandoning the independent-electron picture entirely and recognizing that strong Coulomb repulsion between electrons can, by itself, drive localization. This insight, formalized by Mott and later distilled into the Hubbard model, established correlation-driven insulation as a phenomenon distinct from band insulation. The present paper offers a theoretical exploration of the MIT problem, tracing its conceptual development from the Mott criterion through the Hubbard Hamiltonian, the Brinkman–Rice scenario of quasiparticle mass divergence, and the watershed development of dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT), which rendered the Mott transition quantitatively tractable for the first time. We argue that the competition between the electronic bandwidth and the on-site interaction encoded in the ratio U/W provides the unifying organizing principle for the field. Building toward the modern frontier, we examine how the Mott transition connects to quantum phase transitions and quantum criticality, where zero-temperature instabilities governed by quantum rather than thermal fluctuations produce non-Fermi-liquid behavior and anomalous scaling. Case studies of vanadium oxides, rare-earth nickelates, and doped cuprates illustrate the diversity and subtlety of real correlated materials. We conclude that the MIT remains a central and unresolved problem whose continued study is increasingly entangled with the development of quantum materials and quantum technologies. Keywords: Metal–Insulator Transition; Mott Insulator; Strongly Correlated Electrons; Hubbard Model; DMFT; Quantum Criticality; Quantum Materials; Condensed Matter Physics
We address the nature of the Mott transition in the Hubbard model at half-filling using cluster dynamical mean field theory (DMFT). We compare cluster-DMFT results with those of single-site DMFT. We show that inclusion of the short-range correlations on top of the on-site correlations does not change the order of the transition between the paramagnetic metal and the paramagnetic Mott insulator, which remains first order. However, the short range correlations reduce substantially the critical U and modify the shape of the transition lines. Moreover, they lead to very different physical properties of the metallic and insulating phases near the transition point. Approaching the transition from the metallic side, we find an anomalous metallic state with very low coherence scale. The insulating state is characterized by the narrow Mott gap with pronounced peaks at the gap edge.
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.
Correlated electrons in a binary alloy ${A}_{x}{B}_{1\ensuremath{-}x}$ are investigated within the Hubbard model and dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT). The random energies ${\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{i}$ have a bimodal probability distribution and an energy separation $\ensuremath{\Delta}.$ We solve the DMFT equations by the numerical renormalization-group method at zero temperature and calculate the spectral density as a function of disorder strength $\ensuremath{\Delta}$ and interaction U at different fillings. For filling factors $\ensuremath{\nu}=x$ or 1+x the lower or upper alloy subband is half filled and the system becomes a Mott insulator at strong interactions, with a correlation gap at the Fermi level. At the metal-insulator transition hysteresis is observed. We also analyze the effective theory in the $\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{\ensuremath{\Delta}}\ensuremath{\infty}$ limit and find good agreement between analytical and numerical results for the critical interaction Uc at which the metal-insulator transition occurs.
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.
A new numerical algorithm for interacting fermion systems to treat the grand-canonical ensemble is proposed and examined by extending the path-integral renormalization group method. To treat the grand-canonical ensemble, the particle-hole transformation is applied to the Hamiltonian and basis states. In the interaction-term projection, the Stratonovich-Hubbard transformation which hybridizes up and down spin electrons is introduced. By using this method, the phase diagram of the two-dimensional Hubbard model with next-nearest-neighbor transfer is accurately determined by treating the filling-control (FC) and bandwidth-control (BC) Mott transitions on the same ground. A V-shaped Mott insulating phase is obtained in the plane of the chemical potential and the Coulomb interaction, where the transitions at the corner (BC) and the edges (FC) show contrasted characters with large critical fluctuations near the edges coexisting with the first-order transition at the corner. This contrasted behavior is shown to be consistent with the V-shape structure of the phase boundary because of a general relation, in which the slope of the metal-insulator transition line in the phase diagram is expressed by thermodynamic quantities. The V-shaped opening of the Mott gap is favorably compared with the experimental results of the transition metal oxides.