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 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.
We introduce a slave-fermion formulation in which to study the charge dynamics of the half-filled Hubbard model on the square lattice. In this description, the charge degrees of freedom are represented by fermionic holons and doublons and the Mott-insulating characteristics of the ground state are the consequence of holon–doublon bound-state formation. The bosonic spin degrees of freedom are described by the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model, yielding long-ranged (Néel) magnetic order at zero temperature. Within this framework and in the self-consistent Born approximation, we perform systematic calculations of the average double occupancy, the electronic density of states, the spectral function and the optical conductivity. Qualitatively, our method reproduces the lower and upper Hubbard bands, the spectral-weight transfer into a coherent quasiparticle band at their lower edges and the renormalisation of the Mott gap, which is associated with holon–doublon binding, due to the interactions of both quasiparticle species with the magnons. The zeros of the Green function at the chemical potential give the Luttinger volume, the poles of the self-energy reflect the underlying quasiparticle dispersion with a spin-renormalised hopping parameter and the optical gap is directly related to the Mott gap. Quantitatively, the square-lattice Hubbard model is one of the best-characterised problems in correlated condensed matter and many numerical calculations, all with different strengths and weaknesses, exist with which to benchmark our approach. From the semi-quantitative accuracy of our results for all but the weakest interaction strengths, we conclude that a self-consistent treatment of the spin-fluctuation effects on the charge degrees of freedom captures all the essential physics of the antiferromagnetic Mott–Hubbard insulator. We remark in addition that an analytical approximation with these properties serves a vital function in developing a full understanding of the fundamental physics of the Mott state, both in the antiferromagnetic insulator and at finite temperatures and dopings.
The Mott transition plays a key role in strongly correlated physics, but its nature is not yet fully understood. Motivated by the recent development of the Schwinger boson approach for the Kondo lattice, we propose in this paper a slave fermion algorithm to study the Mott transition. Upon local approximation, our method yields a phase diagram with a zero-temperature continuous (Mott) metal-insulator transition at finite Coulomb interaction U for the half-filled one-band Hubbard model on a square lattice, and the resistivity exhibits a critical scaling around the quantum Widom line. We argue that the Mott transition may be associated with a dynamic charge Kondo effect of local degenerate doublon and holon states, causing sharp resonances on the doublon, holon, and electron spectra. The transition is pushed to U=0 once intersite antiferromagnetic correlations are included, in agreement with exact numerical calculations. Our approach captures some essential features of the Mott transition and offers an alternative angle to view this important problem. It can be extended to study other correlated electron models with more complicated local interactions.
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.
We investigate finite-temperature precursors of Mottness in the repulsive Hubbard model above the spin-ordering temperature, using numerically exact determinant quantum Monte Carlo. We show that the finite-temperature crossover is accompanied by a pronounced suppression of charge fluctuations, despite the presence of a gapless single-particle spectra, demonstrating that Mottness first emerges via two-particle response in an anomalous metallic regime, before appearing in single-particle spectral functions. We further show that a gap formation in the density of states occurs through momentum-resolved redistribution of spectral weight across the Brillouin zone, that begins at the onset of anomalous metallic regime, rather than through gap formation in single-particle spectral functions at individual momenta. Upon doping, the anomalous-metallic regime generates transport and spectroscopic signatures characteristic of doped Mott insulators. This shows that the transport and spectroscopic anomalies of the doped Hubbard model do not require the presence of a fully formed Mott insulator at half-filling, but instead originate from the strong charge-response renormalization and spectral-weight redistribution that develop within the precursor anomalous metallic regime at half-filling.
Long-wavelength spin fluctuations prohibit antiferromagnetic long-range order at finite temperature in two dimensions. Nevertheless, the correlation length starts to grow rapidly at a crossover temperature, leading to critical slowing down and to a renormalized-classical regime over a wide range of temperature, between a fraction of the mean-field transition temperature and the zero-temperature ordered state. This leads to a single-particle pseudogap of the kind observed in electron-doped cuprates. Very few theoretical methods can claim an accurate description of this regime. The challenge is that in this regime Fermi-liquid quasiparticles are already destroyed and new quasiparticles of the ordered state are not fully formed yet. Here, we study this problem for the two-dimensional Hubbard model by first generalizing the two-particle self-consistent approach. Using a special algorithm, spin fluctuations are treated in the thermodynamic limit even for large correlation lengths. The effects of Kanamori-Br\"uckner screening, of classical and of quantum fluctuations are taken into account. Results are presented at half filling for the one-band Hubbard model with nearest-neighbor hopping. They agree well with available benchmark diagrammatic quantum Monte Carlo at high temperature where the pseudogap opens up. In addition to temperature-dependent spectral properties, we find quantum corrections to the zero-temperature renormalized mean-field antiferromagnetic gap. Finally, analytic continuation of the Matsubara results for spectral functions show that the pseudogap opens up at significantly higher temperature than was previously identified based on the Matsubara data only.
The influence of spin and charge fluctuations on spectra of the two-dimensional fermionic Hubbard model is considered using the strong coupling diagram technique. Infinite sequences of diagrams containing ladder inserts, which describe the interaction of electrons with these fluctuations, are summed, and obtained equations are self-consistently solved for the ranges of Hubbard repulsions [Formula: see text], temperatures [Formula: see text] and electron concentrations [Formula: see text] with t the intersite hopping constant. For all considered U the system exhibits a transition to the long-range antiferromagnetic order at [Formula: see text]. At the same time no indication of charge ordering is observed. Obtained solutions agree satisfactorily with results of other approaches and obey moments sum rules. In the considered region of the U-T plane, the curve separating metallic solutions passes from [Formula: see text] at the highest temperatures to U = 2t at [Formula: see text] for half-filling. If only short-range fluctuations are allowed for the remaining part of this region is occupied by insulating solutions. Taking into account long-range fluctuations leads to strengthening of maxima tails, which transform a part of insulating solutions into bad-metal states. For low T, obtained results allow us to trace the gradual transition from the regime of strong correlations with the pronounced four-band structure and well-defined Mott gap for [Formula: see text] to the Slater regime of weak correlations with the spectral intensity having a dip along the boundary of the magnetic Brillouin zone due to an antiferromagnetic ordering for [Formula: see text]. For [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] doping leads to the occurrence of a pseudogap near the Fermi level, which is a consequence of the splitting out of a narrow band from a Hubbard subband. Obtained spectra feature waterfalls and Fermi arcs, which are similar to those observed in hole-doped cuprates.