Abstract For the Mott insulator state of the Fermi-Hubbard model in the strong-coupling limit, we study the interaction between quasi-particles in the form of doublons and holons. Comparing different methods – the hierarchy of correlations, strong-coupling perturbation theory, and exact analytic solutions for the Hubbard tetramer – we find an effective interaction between doublons and/or holons to linear order in the hopping strength which can display attractive as well as repulsive contributions, depending on the involved momenta. Finally, we speculate about the implications of our findings for high-temperature superconductivity.
Abstract Via the hierarchy of correlations, we study doublon–holon pair creation in the Mott state of the Fermi–Hubbard model (in higher dimensions) induced by a time-dependent electric field. Special emphasis is placed on the analogy to electron–positron pair creation from the vacuum in quantum electrodynamics. We find that the accuracy and applicability of this analogy depends on the spin structure of the Mott background. For Ising type anti-ferromagnetic order, we derive an effective Dirac equation. A Mott state without any spin order or spin polarized states do not explicitly display the same quasi-relativistic behavior.
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.
For the Fermi-Hubbard model in the Mott insulator phase, we employ the hierarchy of correlations to study how doublon and holon quasi-particle excitations are affected by adding disorder to the system. We study two types of disorder: charge disorder, in the form of on-site potential randomness; and spin disorder, in the form of a fixed, randomly generated background spin arrangement. By analysing the quasi-particle eigen-spectra and quantifying the degree to which the corresponding eigen-states localise, we find both an energetic and spatial separation between localised and delocalised states in the charge disorder. In contrast, the spin disorder results in localised states throughout the quasi-particle bands. Finally, we repeat our calculations using strong-coupling perturbation theory, and compare the results obtained from both methods.
A phase diagram of two Mott-Hubbard planes interacting with a short-range Coulomb repulsion is presented. Considering the case of equal amount of doping by holes in one layer as electrons in the other, a holon-doublon inter-layer exciton formation is shown to be a natural consequence of Coulomb attraction. Quasiparticle spectrum is gapped and incoherent below a critical doping
δc due to the formation of excitons. A spin liquid insulator (SLI) phase is thus realized without the lattice frustration. The critical value
δc sensitively depends on the inter-layer interaction strength. In the
tJ model description of each layer with the d-wave pairing,
δc marks the crossover between SLI and d-wave superconductor. The SLI phase, despite being non-superconducting and charge-gapped, still shows electromagnetic response similar to that of a superfluid due to the exciton transport. Including antiferromagnetic order in the
tJ model introduces magnetically ordered phases at low doping and pushes the spin liquid phase to a larger inter-layer interaction strength and higher doping concentrations.
In the ionic Hubbard model, the on-site repulsion
U, which drives a Mott insulator, and the ionic potential
V, which drives a band insulator, compete with each other to open up a window of charge fluctuations when $U\ensuremath{\sim}V$. We study this model on square and cubic lattices in the limit of large
U and
V, with $V\ensuremath{\sim}U$. Using an effective Hamiltonian and a slave-boson approach with both doublons and holons, we find that the system undergoes a phase transition as a function of
V from an antiferromagnetic Mott insulator to a paramagnetic insulator with strong singlet correlations, which is driven by a condensate of ``neutral'' doublon-holon pairs. On further increasing
V, the system undergoes another phase transition to a superconducting phase driven by condensate of ``charged'' doublons and holons. The superfluid phase, characterized by the presence of a coherent (but gapped) fermionic quasiparticle and
hc/e flux quantization, has a high ${T}_{c}\ensuremath{\sim}t$, which shows a dome-shaped behavior as a function of
V. The paramagnetic insulator phase has a deconfined U(1) gauge field and associated gapless photon excitations. We also discuss how these phases can be detected in the ultracold-atom context.
To understand the mechanism of Mott transitions in case of no magnetic influence, superfluid-insulator (Mott) transitions in the S=0 Bose Hubbard model at unit filling are studied on the square and triangular lattices, using a variational Monte Carlo method. In trial many-body wave functions, we introduce various types of attractive correlation factors between a doubly-occupied site (doublon, D) and an empty site (holon, H), which play a central role for Mott transitions, in addition to the onsite repulsive (Gutzwiller) factor. By optimizing distance-dependent parameters, we study various properties of this type of wave functions. With a hint from the Mott transition arising in a completely D-H bound state, we propose an improved picture of Mott transitions, by introducing two characteristic length scales, the D-H binding length
ξdh and the minimum D-D exclusion length
ξdd. Generally, a Mott transition occurs when
ξdh becomes comparable to
ξdd. In the conductive (superfluid) state, domains of D-H pairs overlap with each other (
ξdh>ξdd); thereby D and H can propagate independently as density carriers by successively exchanging the partners. In contrast, intersite repulsive Jastrow (D-D and H-H) factors have little importance for the Mott transition.