The Mott transition, a metal-insulator transition due to strong electronic interaction, is observed in many materials without an accompanying change of system symmetry. An important open question in Mott's proposal is the role of long-range screening, whose drastic change across the quantum phase transition may self-consistently make the transition more abrupt, toward a first-order one. Here, we investigate this effect in a model system of hydrogen atoms in a cubic lattice, using charge self-consistent dynamical mean-field theory that incorporates approximately the long-range interaction within the density functional treatment. We found that the system is well within the charge-transfer (CT) regime and that the CT gap intimately related to the Mott transition closes smoothly instead. This indicates that the long-range screening does not play an essential role in this prototypical example. This finding can be understood from the fact that the obtained insulating phase in this model system is driven by strong local interaction, and the transition is associated with the closing of CT gap. Contrary to Mott's length-scale argument, such energetic competition between kinetic energy and local interaction is thus insensitive to long-range screening.
The Mott transition, a metal-insulator transition due to strong electronic interaction, is observed in many materials without an accompanying change of system symmetry. An important open question in Mott's proposal is the role of long-range screening, whose drastic change across the quantum phase transition may self-consistently make the transition more abrupt, toward a first-order one. Here, we investigate this effect in a model system of hydrogen atoms in a cubic lattice, using charge self-consistent dynamical mean-field theory that incorporates approximately the long-range interaction within the density functional treatment. We found that the system is well within the charge-transfer (CT) regime and that the CT gap intimately related to the Mott transition closes smoothly instead. This indicates that the long-range screening does not play an essential role in this prototypical example. This finding can be understood from the fact that the obtained insulating phase in this model system is driven by strong local interaction, and the transition is associated with the closing of CT gap. Contrary to Mott's length-scale argument, such energetic competition between kinetic energy and local interaction is thus insensitive to long-range screening.
Using extended dynamical mean-field theory and its combination with the GW approximation, we compute the phase diagrams and local spectral functions of the single-band extended Hubbard model on the square and simple cubic lattices, considering long-range interactions up to the third nearest neighbors. The longer-range interactions shift the boundaries between the metallic, charge-ordered insulating, and Mott insulating phases, and lead to characteristic changes in the screening modes and local spectral functions. Momentum-dependent self-energy contributions enhance the correlation effects and thus compete with the additional screening effect from longer-range Coulomb interactions. Our results suggest that the influence of longer-range intersite interactions is significant, and that these effects deserve attention in realistic studies of correlated materials.
This dissertation examines the impact of long-range interactions in lattice models of low-dimensional strongly correlated systems with a focus on their relevance to anomalous electronic transport. Traditionally, the Hubbard model forms the basis of theoretical and numerical investigations of strongly correlated quantum matter. This effective model constitutes the simplest model of electronic correlation and relies on an approximation that truncates electron-electron interactions to a local, on-site potential. While this approximation has proved valid in several instances, certain unexplained phenomena in correlated materials challenge us to develop new perspectives and approaches.In the first part of this thesis, we discuss the historical motivation for our current work from both a theoretical and an experimental viewpoint. In particular, we cover the discovery of bad metallic transport and the associated breakdown of Boltzmann theory of electron transport. We further review examples of strongly correlated systems that exhibit bad metallic transport and other exotic phenomena that suggest the possibility of poorly screened electronic interactions acting as a common microscopic mechanism. This general feature justifies the development of a theoretical framework that is capable of examining long-range interactions in a controlled, systematic manner.Motivated by this, we analyze a long-range interacting lattice model for spinless electrons in two dimensions via exact diagonalization on a finite cluster in real space. As this method is susceptible to finite-size errors, we discuss at length its implementation and technical details designed specifically to reduce these errors, namely the use of twisted boundary conditions and the Ewald summation. We determine the phase diagram at zero temperature and demonstrate that the long-range interactions act as a source of self-generated disorder that drives the development of a strongly correlated pseudogap phase, in a manner reminiscent of the classical Efros-Shklovskii Coulomb gap. Furthermore, we establish that this phenomenon is independent of lattice geometry, a fact that represents the broad potential of long-range interactions in giving rise to a novel form of strongly correlated behavior.Following our zero-temperature study, we address the question of whether this self-generated disorder can survive in the presence of thermal fluctuations and local Coulomb repulsion (Hubbard terms) relevant in Mott systems, a situation closer to those in experimental systems. By means of classical Monte Carlo calculations, we show that not only does the self-generated disorder survive, but that it also acts as a microscopic mechanism that generates bad metallic transport. Upon further investigation, we determine that the long-range interactions, in combination with quantum fluctuations, cause a transient localization of the charge carriers, thereby suppressing the conductivity values below those predicted in conventional Boltzmann theory, as observed experimentally.In conclusion, we have established that long-range interactions in electronic models act as a microscopic mechanism that is capable of causing exotic phenomena in numerous materials. We conclude that a proper treatment of both quantum fluctuations and long-range interactions should next be studied with the finite temperature Lanczos method, which will act as a bridge between our exact diagonalization and Monte Carlo studies. Overall, this dissertation emphasizes the capability of long-range interactions to produce novel phenomena and elicits further thought-provoking questions concerning the interplay with Mott-Hubbard physics and external disorder, crucial in metallic systems.
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.
The metal-insulator transition in one-dimensional fermionic systems with long-range interaction is investigated. We have focused on an excitation spectrum by the exact diagonalization technique in sectors with different momentum quantum numbers. At rational fillings, we have demonstrated gap opening transitions from the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid to the Mott insulator associated with a discrete symmetry breaking by changing the interaction strength. Finite interaction range is crucial to have the Mott transition at a rational filling away from the half filling. It is consistent with the strong coupling picture where the Mott gap exists at any rational fillings with sufficiently strong interaction. The critical regions as a quantum phase transition are also investigated numerically. Nonanalytic behavior of the Mott gap is the characteristic in the weak coupling. It is of the order of the interaction in the strong coupling. It implies that the metal-insulator transition of the model is of the infinite order as a quantum phase transition at zero temperature. The fractal nature of the ground-state phase diagram is also revealed.
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.
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.