The Mott transition is usually considered as resulting from the divergence of the effective mass of the quasiparticle in the Fermi-liquid theory; the dispersion relation around the Fermi level is considered to become flat toward the Mott transition. Here, to clarify the characterization of the Mott transition under the assumption of a Fermi-liquid-like ground state, the electron-addition excitation from the Gutzwiller wavefunction in the $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}J$ model is investigated on a chain, ladder, square lattice, and bilayer square lattice in the single-mode approximation using a Monte Carlo method. The numerical results demonstrate that an electronic mode that is continuously deformed from a noninteracting band at zero electron density loses its spectral weight and gradually disappears toward the Mott transition. It exhibits essentially the magnetic dispersion relation shifted by the Fermi momentum in the small-doping limit as indicated by recent studies for the Hubbard and $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}J$ models, even if the ground state is assumed to be a Fermi-liquid-like state exhibiting gradual disappearance of the quasiparticle weight. This implies that, rather than as the divergence of the effective mass or disappearance of the carrier density that is expected in conventional single-particle pictures, the Mott transition can be better understood as freezing of the charge degrees of freedom while the spin degrees of freedom remain active, even if the ground state is like a Fermi liquid.
We study the strong correlation effects in the vicinity of the Mott metal-insulator transition using coupled clean or disordered Hubbard chains with a infinitely large coordinate number
D⊥→∞ in the direction perpendicular to the chains and with a long-range transverse hopping. Strong electron correlation effects are treated partially non-perturbatively with the use of the exact results for the 1D Hubbard model. In the case of clean systems, the thermodynamic and transport quantities which characterize the Mott transition from the Fermi liquid state, such as the specific heat coefficient, the Drude weight, and the compressibility, are obtained as functions of hole-doping
δ=1−n (
n, electron density) by the systematic expansion in terms of the inverse of the transverse hopping range
l⊥. We find that the
δ-dependence of these quantities shows non-universal behaviors with exponents depending on the strength of electron-electron interaction. In the presence of disorder, it is shown that the frequency-dependence of the dynamical conductivity obeys the Mott's law, implying the possibility of {\it Mott glass state} for
δ→0, provided that there exists a finite range interaction.