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Progress of Theoretical Physics Supplement

Can Disorder Drive a Mott Insulator into a Metal in 2D?

Nandini Trivedi, Dariush Heidarian

Published Jan 1, 2005• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We find that isoelectronic disorder generates novel phases in a Mott insulator at half filling. For both binary disorder potentials and for random site disorder models, the Mott gap is destroyed locally generating puddles of gapless excitations. With increasing disorder, these puddles grow and rather surprisingly, form an inhomogenous metal in 2D. Antiferromagnetic long range order is more robust than the Mott gap and persists into the metal, getting destroyed close to a critical disorder where doubly occupied and empty sites percolate.

DOI
10.1143/ptps.160.296

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We find that isoelectronic disorder generates novel phases in a Mott insulator at half filling. For both binary disorder potentials and for random site disorder models, the Mott gap is destroyed locally generating puddles of gapless excitations. With increasing disorder, these puddles grow and rather surprisingly, form an inhomogenous metal in 2D. Antiferromagnetic long range order is more robust than the Mott gap and persists into the metal, getting destroyed close to a critical disorder where doubly occupied and empty sites percolate.
We show that, with increasing randomness, the spectral gap in a 2D Mott-Hubbard insulator is destroyed first at a disorder V(c1), while antiferromagnetism persists up to a higher V(c2). Most unexpectedly, between V(c1) and V(c2) the system is metallic and is sandwiched between the Mott insulator below V(c1) and the Anderson insulator above V(c2). The metal is formed when the spectral gap gets destroyed locally in regions where the disorder potential is high enough to overcome the interelectron repulsion. This generates puddles with enhanced charge fluctuations that percolate with increasing disorder, resulting in a spatially inhomogeneous metallic phase.
We elucidate the mechanism by which a Mott insulator transforms into a non-Fermi liquid metal upon increasing disorder at half filling. By correlating maps of the local density of states, the local magnetization, and the local bond conductivity, we find a collapse of the Mott gap toward a V-shaped pseudogapped density of states that occurs concomitantly with the decrease of magnetism around the highly disordered sites but an increase of bond conductivity. These metallic regions percolate to form an emergent non-Fermi liquid phase with a conductivity that increases with temperature. Bond conductivity measured via local microwave impedance combined with charge and spin local spectroscopies are ideal tools to corroborate our predictions.
We study the ground-state phase diagram of the Anderson-Hubbard model with correlated hopping at half-filling in one dimension. The Hamiltonian has a local Coulomb repulsion UUU and a disorder potential with local energies randomly distributed in the interval $(\ensuremath{-}W,+W)$ with equal probability, acting on the singly occupied sites. The hopping process which modifies the number of doubly occupied sites is forbidden. The hopping between nearest-neighbor singly occupied and empty sites or between singly occupied and doubly occupied sites has the same amplitude ttt. We identify three different phases as functions of the disorder amplitude WWW and Coulomb interaction strength U>0U>0U>0. When U<4tU<4tU<4t the system shows a metallic phase: (i) only when no disorder is present W=0W=0W=0 or an Anderson-localized phase, (ii) when disorder is introduced $W\ensuremath{\ne}0$. When U>4tU>4tU>4t the Anderson-localized phase survives as long as disorder effects dominate on the interaction effects, otherwise a Mott-insulator phase (iii) arises. Phases (i) and (ii) are characterized by a finite density of doublons and a vanishing charge gap among the ground state and the excited states. Phase (iii) is characterized by the vanishing density of doublons and a finite gap for the charge excitations.
We derive the disorder vs doping phase diagram of the doped Hubbard model via dynamical mean-field theory combined with typical medium theory, which allows the description of both Mott (correlation driven) and Anderson (disorder driven) metal-insulator transitions. We observe a transition from a metal to an Anderson-Mott insulator for increasing disorder strength at all interactions. In the weak correlation regime and rather small doping, the Anderson-Mott insulator displays properties which are similar to the ones found at half filling. In particular, this phase is characterized by the presence of empty sites. If we further increase either the doping or the correlation, however, an Anderson-Mott phase of a different kind arises for sharply weaker disorder strength. This phase occupies the largest part of the phase diagram in the strong-correlation regime and is characterized by the absence of the empty sites.
A heterostructure of a semi-infinite metal and a Mott insulator is considered. It is supposed that both materials have an identical lattice spacing and hopping integrals and differ in the Hubbard repulsion which is negligible in the metal and exceeds the critical value for the Mott transition in the insulator. At half-filling and for low temperatures the insulator has long-range antiferromagnetic order. Its low-lying elementary excitations are standing spin waves and a spin-wave mode which is localized near the interface and has a two-dimensional dispersion. This mode ejects bulk modes from the boundary region. The antiferromagnetic ordering of the insulator induces an antiferromagnetic order in the metal where the magnetization decays exponentially with distance from the interface. This decay is characterized by the correlation length of about 6 lattice spacings.
We use determinant quantum Monte Carlo simulations and exact diagonalization to explore insulating behavior in the Hubbard model with a bimodal distribution of randomly positioned local site energies. From the temperature dependence of the compressibility and conductivity, we show that gapped, incompressible Mott insulating phases exist away from half-filling when the variance of the local site energies is sufficiently large. The compressible regions around this Mott phase are metallic only if the density of sites with the corresponding energy exceeds the percolation threshold, but are Anderson insulators otherwise.