The spectrum of the strongly correlated systems usually shows resonant peaks at finite energy, with examples in the 115 Ce family which are reproduced by the dynamical mean-field theory. A similar structure has been seen recently in the orbitally selective Mott phase of the two-band model, known as the doublon-holon bound state, with implications for the fate of such phase in the zero Hund's coupling limit. We show that these features can be captured with the slave-particle methods once their Hilbert space is taken into account. We use slave-spin calculations, justifiable in the limit of large dimensions, to explicitly demonstrate this and compare the results with dynamical mean-field theory.
The spectrum of the strongly correlated systems usually shows resonant peaks at finite energy, with examples in the 115 Ce family which are reproduced by the dynamical mean-field theory. A similar structure has been seen recently in the orbitally selective Mott phase of the two-band model, known as the doublon-holon bound state, with implications for the fate of such phase in the zero Hund's coupling limit. We show that these features can be captured with the slave-particle methods once their Hilbert space is taken into account. We use slave-spin calculations, justifiable in the limit of large dimensions, to explicitly demonstrate this and compare the results with dynamical mean-field theory.
Multiorbital interactions have the capacity to produce an interesting kind of doublon-holon bound state that consists of a single-hole state in one band and a doubly occupied state in another band. Interband doublon-holon pair excitations in the two-orbital Hubbard model are studied by using dynamical mean-field theory with the Lanczos method as the impurity solver. We find that the interband bound states may provide several in-gap quasiparticle peaks in the density of states of the narrow band in the orbital-selective Mott phase with a small Hund's rule coupling (J). There exists a corresponding energy relation between the in-gap states of the narrow band and the peaks in the excitation spectrum of the doublon for the wide band. We also find that the spin-flip and pair-hopping Hund interactions can divide one quasiparticle peak into two peaks, where the splitting energy increases linearly with increasing J. Strong Hund's rule coupling can move the interband doublon-holon pair excitations outside the Mott gap and restrict the bound states by suppressing the orbital selectivity of the doubly occupied and single-hole states.
We examine whether the Mott transition of a half-filled, two-orbital Hubbard model with unequal bandwidths occurs simultaneously for both bands or whether it is a two-stage process in which the orbital with narrower bandwith localizes first (giving rise to an intermediate ``orbital-selective'' Mott phase). This question is addressed using both dynamical mean-field theory and a representation of fermion operators in terms of slave quantum spins, followed by a mean-field approximation (similar in spirit to a Gutzwiller approximation). In the latter approach, the Mott transition is found to be orbital selective for all values of the Coulomb exchange (Hund) coupling J when the bandwidth ratio is small and only beyond a critical value of J when the bandwidth ratio is larger. Dynamical mean-field theory partially confirms these findings, but the intermediate phase at J=0 is found to differ from a conventional Mott insulator, with spectral weight extending down to arbitrary low energy. Finally, the orbital-selective Mott phase is found, at zero temperature, to be unstable with respect to an interorbital hybridization V and replaced at small V by a state with a large effective mass (and a low quasiparticle coherence scale) for the narrower band.
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.
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.
The multiorbital Hubbard model is expressed in terms of quantum phase variables (``slave rotors'') conjugate to the local charge, and of auxiliary fermions, providing an economical representation of the Hilbert space of strongly correlated systems. When the phase variables are treated in a local mean-field manner, similar results to the dynamical mean-field theory are obtained, namely a Brinkman-Rice transition at commensurate fillings together with a ``preformed'' Mott gap in the single-particle density of states. The slave-rotor formalism allows to go beyond the local description and take into account spatial correlations, following an analogy to the superfluid-insulator transition of bosonic systems. We find that the divergence of the effective mass at the metal-insulator transition is suppressed by short range magnetic correlations in finite-dimensional systems. Furthermore, the strict separation of energy scales between the Fermi-liquid coherence scale and the Mott gap, found in the local picture, holds only approximately in finite dimensions, due to the existence of low-energy collective modes related to zero-sound.
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.