We study the binding of a holon to a doublon in a half-filled Hubbard model as the mechanism of the zero-temperature metal-insulator transition. In a spin polarized system a single holon-doublon (HD) pair exhibits a binding transition on a 3D lattice, or a sharp crossover on a 2D lattice, corresponding well to the standard Mott transition in unpolarized systems. We extend the HD-pair study towards nonpolarized systems by considering more general spin background and by treating the finite HD density within a BCS-type approximation. Both approaches lead to a discontinuous transition away from the fully polarized system and give density correlations consistent with numerical results on a triangular lattice.
We argue that the binding between doubly occupied (doublon) and empty (holon) sites governs incoherent excitations and plays a key role in the Mott transition in strongly correlated Mott-Hubbard systems. We construct a new saddle-point solution with doublon-holon binding in the Kotliar-Ruckenstein slave-boson functional integral formulation of the Hubbard model. On a half-filled honeycomb lattice and square lattice, the ground state is found to exhibit a continuous transition from a paramagnetic semimetal/metal to an antiferromagnetic-ordered Slater insulator with coherent quasiparticles at
Uc1, followed by a Mott transition into an electron-fractionalized AF
∗ phase without coherent excitations at
Uc2. Such a phase structure appears to be generic for bipartite lattices without frustration. We show that doublon-holon binding unites the three important ideas of strong correlation: coherent quasiparticles, incoherent Hubbard bands, and deconfined Mott insulator.