The orbital-selective Mott phase (OSMP) is commonly described as a coexistence of localized and itinerant electrons within effectively decoupled orbitals, but emerging evidence for quasiparticle breakdown points to physics beyond this picture, whose microscopic origin remains unknown. Using dynamical mean-field theory for the two-band Hubbard model, we show that the spin-flip and Ising-type components of Hund's coupling generate local spin excitations (LSEs). These LSEs couple electrons between different orbitals, renormalize quasiparticle lifetimes and binding energies, and thereby destroy well-defined quasiparticles in the OSMP. Removing these two components of Hund's coupling restores coherent quasiparticle behavior and fully decouples the charge dynamics of the two bands. Our results therefore identify electronic coupling to LSEs as the fundamental mechanism driving quasiparticle breakdown within the OSMP.
The orbital-selective Mott phase (OSMP) is commonly described as a coexistence of localized and itinerant electrons within effectively decoupled orbitals, but emerging evidence for quasiparticle breakdown points to physics beyond this picture, whose microscopic origin remains unknown. Using dynamical mean-field theory for the two-band Hubbard model, we show that the spin-flip and Ising-type components of Hund's coupling generate local spin excitations (LSEs). These LSEs couple electrons between different orbitals, renormalize quasiparticle lifetimes and binding energies, and thereby destroy well-defined quasiparticles in the OSMP. Removing these two components of Hund's coupling restores coherent quasiparticle behavior and fully decouples the charge dynamics of the two bands. Our results therefore identify electronic coupling to LSEs as the fundamental mechanism driving quasiparticle breakdown within the OSMP.
Quantum orbital-selective Mott (OSM) transitions are investigated within dynamical mean-field theory based on a two-orbital Hubbard model with different bandwidth at half filling. We find two distinct OSM phases both showing coexistence of itinerant electrons and localized spins, dependent on whether the Hund's coupling is full or of Ising type. The critical values and the nature of the OSM transitions are efficiently determined by entanglement entropy. We reveal that vanishing of the Kondo energy scale evidenced by absence of local spin fluctuations at low frequency in local dynamical spin susceptibility is responsible for the appearance of non-Fermi-liquid OSM phase in Ising Hund's coupling case. We argue that this scenario can also be applied to account for emergent quantum non-Fermi liquid in the one-band Hubbard model when short-range antiferromagnetic order is considered.
Using the dynamical mean field theory with Lanczos method as its impurity solver, we study the orbital-selective Mott transition (OSMT) in the two-orbital J model and Jz model. In the multi-orbital systems, the Mott metal-insulator transition occurs successively when the widths of the bands are different. As the narrow orbital becomes Mott insulator while the wide orbital is still in metallic phase, we find an orbital-selective Mott phase (OSMP). There are two different Hubbard models that are frequently used to describe the OSMT, which are named J model and Jz model, respectively. The J Model is composed of the whole Hund's rule coupling terms, including the spin-flip term, the pair-hopping term and the Ising type Hund's rule coupling term. However, there is only Ising type Hund's rule coupling term in the Jz model.#br#We study the ratio of bandwidth W2/W1 on the OSMT by analyzing the results of the density of states and quasi-particle weight. Comparing the phase diagrams obtained from the J and Jz models with the Hund's rule coupling J(Jz)=U/4, we find that the OSMP region of the J model is much larger than that of the Jz model when W2/W1=0.5 or W2/W1=0.2. When the ratio of bandwidth increases to W2/W1=0.8, the OSMP disappears completely in the Jz model. However in the J model, we can still find the OSMT but the area of the OSMP shrinks significantly. Therefore, the OSMT happens more easily in the J model than in the Jz model.#br#In order to discuss the cooperative effect of the bandwidth and Hund's rule coupling on the OSMT, we compare the phase diagrams for different Hund's rule couplings J(Jz)=U/4 and J(Jz)=U/2. We find that when the bandwidth W2/W1≥q 0.7, the OSMT disappears in Jz model in the case of either Jz=U/4 or Jz=U/2. However, the OSMP always exists in the J model if the bandwidths of the two orbitals are different, suggesting that the rotation invariances of the Hund's rule couplings can protect the OSMP. Therefore, one should be more careful when using the Jz model instead of the J model to study the OSMP.
The localization-delocalization transition is at the heart of strong correlation physics. Recently, there is great interest in multiorbital systems where this transition can be restricted to certain orbitals, leading to an orbital-selective Mott phase (OSMP). Theoretically, the OSMP is widely studied for kinetically decoupled orbitals, but the effect of interorbital hopping remains unclear. Here, we show how nonlocal interorbital hopping leads to local hybridization in single-site dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT). Under fairly general circumstances, this implies that, at zero temperature, the OSMP, involving the Mott-insulating state of one orbital, is unstable against interorbital hopping to a different, metallic orbital. We further show that the coherence scale below which all electrons are itinerant is very small and gets exponentially suppressed even if the interorbital hopping is not overly small. Within this framework, the OSMP with interorbital hopping may thus reach down to extremely low temperatures T, but not to T=0. Accordingly, it is part of a coherence-incoherence crossover and not a quantum critical point. We present analytical arguments supported by numerical results using the numerical renormalization group as a DMFT impurity solver. We also compare our findings with previous slave-spin studies.
We investigate the effects of crystal field splitting in a doped two-band Hubbard model with different bandwidths within dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT), using a quantum Monte Carlo impurity solver. In addition to an orbital-selective Mott phase (OSMP) of the narrow band, which is adiabatically connected with the well-studied OSMP in the half-filled case without crystal field splitting, we find, for sufficiently strong interaction and a suitable crystal field, also an OSMP of the wide band. We establish the phase diagram (in the absence of magnetic or orbital order) at moderate doping as a function of interaction strength and crystal field splitting and show that also the wide-band OSMP is associated with non-Fermi-liquid behavior in the case of Ising-type Hund rule couplings. Our numerical results are supplemented by analytical strong-coupling studies of spin order and spectral functions at integer filling.
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.