In this work, we present an analytical framework for studying antiferromagnetic (AFM) Mott insulating states in the Hubbard model. We first derive an analytical solution for the single-particle Green's functions in the atomic limit. Within a second-order perturbation approach, we compute the ground state energy and show that the ground state is antiferromagnetically ordered. Then we derive an analytical solution for single-particle Green's functions when effects of the hopping term are considered in the Néel state. With the analytical solution, we compute the spectral functions and explain various properties of the AFM Mott insulating state as observed both experimentally and numerically: i) magnetic blueshift of the Mott gap; ii) the low energy part in the parental compounds of cuprate high \(T_c\) superconductors, which corresponds to a single band Hubbard model description. This work comprehends the electronic properties of antiferromagnetic Mott states analytically and provides a foundation for future investigations of doped antiferromagnetic Mott insulators, aiming for the mechanism of cuprates high-\(T_c\) superconductivity.
Algebraic-Dynamical Perturbation Theory of Large-U Hubbard Models. Single Particle Spectrum of Antiferromagnetic Mott Insulating States
In this work, we present an analytical framework for studying antiferromagnetic (AFM) Mott insulating states in the Hubbard model. We first derive an analytical solution for the single-particle Green's functions in the atomic limit. Within a second-order perturbation approach, we compute the ground state energy and show that the ground state is antiferromagnetically ordered. Then we derive an analytical solution for single-particle Green's functions when effects of the hopping term are considered in the Néel state. With the analytical solution, we compute the spectral functions and explain various properties of the AFM Mott insulating state as observed both experimentally and numerically: i) magnetic blueshift of the Mott gap; ii) the low energy part in the parental compounds of cuprate high (T_c) superconductors, which corresponds to a single band Hubbard model description. This work comprehends the electronic properties of antiferromagnetic Mott states analytically and provides a foundation for future investigations of doped antiferromagnetic Mott insulators, aiming for the mechanism of cuprates high-(T_c) superconductivity.
With the hierarchical Green’s function approach, we study a doped Mott insulator described with the Hubbard model by analytically solving the equations of motion of an one-particle Green’s function and related multiple-point correlation functions, and find that the separation of the spin and charge degrees of freedom of the electrons is an intrinsic character of the doped Mott insulator. For enough of large on-site repulsive Coulomb interaction, we show that the spectral weight of the one-particle Green’s function is proportional to the hole doping concentration that is mainly produced by the charge fluctuation of electrons, while the excitation spectrum of the electrons is composed of two parts: One is contributed by the spin fluctuation of the electrons, which is proportional to the hole doping concentration, and another one is coming from the coupling between the charge and spin fluctuations of the electrons that takes the maximum at undoping. All of these low energy/temperature physical properties originate from the strong on-site Coulomb interaction. The present results are consistent with the spectroscopy observations of the cuprate superconductors and the numerical calculations in normal state above the pseudogap regime.
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.
We calculate the one-particle density of states for the Mott-Hubbard insulating phase of the Hubbard model on a Bethe lattice in the limit of infinite coordination number. We employ the Kato-Takahashi perturbation theory around the strong-coupling limit to derive the Green function. We show that the Green function for the lower Hubbard band can be expressed in terms of polynomials in the bare hole-hopping operator. We check our technique against the exact solution of the Falicov-Kimball model and give explicit results up to and including second order in the inverse Hubbard interaction. Our results provide a stringent test for analytical and numerical investigations of the Mott-Hubbard insulator and the Mott-Hubbard transition within the dynamical mean-field theory. We find that the Hubbard-III approximation is not satisfactory beyond lowest order, but the local-moment approach provides a very good description of the Mott-Hubbard insulator at strong coupling.
High temperature superconductivity in copper oxides (cuprates) represents one of the most striking phenomena in condensed matter physics. These materials host superconducting states with the highest known critical temperatures, emerging upon doping antiferromagnetic insulator compounds. The antiferromagnetic (AF) insulating and superconducting (SC) phases defy standard descriptions in terms of band picture and conventional phonon-mediated superconductivity. In fact, these phenomena are genuine signatures of strong electronic correlations which hinder effective single-particle descriptions of the many-electron system. After 40 years since their discovery, it is widely accepted that the Hubbard model on the square lattice provides a minimal description of the low-energy electronic properties of cuprates. The model describes the competition between the electronic kinetic energy, modelled by nearest-neighbours hopping t, and the Coulomb repulsion, modelled by a purely local interaction potential U. At half-filling, this competition results in the so-called "Mott localisation" phenomenon, which distinguishes the metallic phase for U/t « 1 from an insulating phase for U/t » 1. The latter is characterised by the almost complete localisation of electrons due to the high energetic cost of hopping towards occupied sites. Interestingly, this basic competition is intimately related to AF ordering and, upon doping, to the formation of the SC state with characteristic d-wave symmetry. The fact that a purely repulsive interaction U is responsible for the formation of a SC state is remarkable, being superconductivity typically associated with an effective attractive interaction. In fact, a d-wave SC state can also be obtained, in general, by considering an attractive potential between electrons of neighbouring sites. Motivated by this observation, in this thesis, we study a modified version of the Hubbard model, dubbed as the "extended Hubbard model", in which we include a nearest-neighbours attractive potential -V. The general goal of this work is to explore the interplay between the purely local repulsion and the non-local attraction. This is not only motivated by the fact that both interactions are, in principle, responsible for d-wave superconductivity, but also by recent experimental observations which strongly suggest that the term -V needs to be included in order to accurately describe the magnetic spectra of some specific compounds. In this thesis, we study the extended Hubbard model using the Hartree-Fock method. Namely, we approximate the ground state by implementing a variational search in the subspace of the many-body Hilbert space of gaussian states. Despite its simplicity, the Hartree-Fock method provides a powerful framework to study competition among different phases, originating from different symmetry breaking mechanisms. In particular, we study the competition between three different phases: the normal phase, characterised by no symmetry breaking, the AF phase, characterised by a lowering of SU(2) symmetry, and the SC phase, characterised by the breaking of U(1) charge conservation. This thesis work led to a number of original results, which can be summarised by the general observation that the non-local attraction -V acts cooperatively with the local repulsion U for the stabilisation of the various phases hosted by the Hubbard model. For the normal phase, we find that the non-local attraction acts as a source of Mott localisation, leading to an effective reduction of the electronic bandwidth. In particular, for values of V larger than a critical value and close to half-filling, we find a strong Mott localisation characterised by the complete flattening of the electronic bands. Interestingly, this result shows an example of Mott localisation that can be described at the level of the Hartree-Fock approximation, whereas Mott localisation in the conventional Hubbard model usually requires more sophisticated approximation schemes. For the AF phase, we restrict our analysis to the half-filled case. We find that the pairing-induced Mott localisation leads to a significant enhancement of the magnetisation, primarily originating from the local repulsion U. Finally, we focus on the superconducting phase and derive self-consistency equations in both singlet and triplet Cooper pairing channels, showing how Cooper pairing can be mediated simultaneously by both the local repulsion and the non-local attraction. Therefore, we numerically investigate the singlet channel and find evidence of "symmetry mixing", namely, the formation of a superconducting gap that is neither symmetric nor anti-symmetric under rotations of π/2 in the plane. We show that symmetry mixing is connected to the emergence of a finite nematic order parameter, that signals the breaking of planar rotational symmetry. This nematic symmetry breaking results in the fact that the renormalisation of bands becomes anisotropic, producing a difference in electronic kinetics in the x and y directions. To summarise, the original results obtained in this thesis show that the non-local pairing provides a different route towards the formation of key strongly correlated phenomena, including Mott localisation and nematic superconductivity, and call for future investigation using more sophisticated methods such as, for example, the Dynamical Mean Field Theory.
Proximity to a Mott insulating phase is likely to be an important physical ingredient of a theory that aims to describe high-temperature superconductivity in the cuprates. Quantum cluster methods are well suited to describe the Mott phase. Hence, as a step toward a quantitative theory of the competition between antiferromagnetism and d-wave superconductivity in the cuprates, we use cellular dynamical mean-field theory to compute zero-temperature properties of the two-dimensional square lattice Hubbard model. The d-wave order parameter is found to scale like the superexchange coupling J for on-site interaction U comparable to or larger than the bandwidth. The order parameter also assumes a dome shape as a function of doping, while, by contrast, the gap in the single-particle density of states decreases monotonically with increasing doping. In the presence of a finite second neighbor hopping ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}$, the zero-temperature phase diagram displays the electron-hole asymmetric competition between antiferromagnetism and superconductivity that is observed experimentally in the cuprates. Adding realistic third neighbor hopping ${t}^{\ensuremath{''}}$ improves the overall agreement with the experimental phase diagram. Since band parameters can vary depending on the specific cuprate considered, the sensitivity of the theoretical phase diagram to band parameters challenges the commonly held assumption that the doping vs Tc∕Tcmax phase diagram of the cuprates is universal. The calculated angle-resolved photoemission spectrum displays the observed electron-hole asymmetry. The tendency to homogeneous coexistence of the superconducting and antiferromagnetic order parameters is stronger than observed in most experiments but consistent with many theoretical results and with experiments in some layered high-temperature superconductors. Clearly, our calculations reproduce important features of d-wave superconductivity in the cuprates that would otherwise be considered anomalous from the point of view of the standard Bardeen--Cooper--Schrieffer approach. At strong coupling, d-wave superconductivity and antiferromagnetism naturally appear as two equally important competing instabilities of the normal phase of the same underlying Hamiltonian.
Antiferromagnetic and metal to insulator transitions in the ground state of two-dimensional half-filled and nearly half-filled Hubbard models with the nearest neighbor and the second nearest neighbor transfers (- t and t ′ , respectively) are studied by using the Green's function approach with the self-energy up to the second order in the coupling constant U . For a choice of the parameter value t ′ / t =0.2 the half-filled model undergoes the first order phase transition between paramagnetic metallic (PM) phase and antiferromagnetic insulator (AFI) phase at U / t =4.0 while the first order transition between PM and antiferromagnetic metallic (AFM) phases takes place for nearly half-filled band. The one-electron spectral density is calculated for the PM, AFM, and AFI phases near the phase boundaries. In the PM phase the quasi-particle dispersion indicates the band narrowing from the Hartree-Fock results and the flat band behavior as was indicated by previous stadies and was observed in high- T c cuprates. The quasi-particle dispersion in the AFM phase is seen to be close to the Hartree-Fock results.