Though most fermionic Mott insulators order at low temperatures, ordering is ancillary to their insulating behavior. Our emphasis here is on disentangling ordering from the intrinsic strongly correlated physics of a doped half-filled band. To this end, we focus on the two-dimensional Hubbard model. Because the charge gap arises from on-site correlations, we have been refining the nonperturbative approach of Matsumoto and Mancini [Phys. Rev. B 55, 2095 (1997)] which incorporates local physics. Crucial to this method is a self-consistent two-site dynamical cluster expansion which builds in the nearest-neighbor energy scale J. At half-filling, we find that the spectral function possesses a gap of order U and is devoid of any coherent quasiparticle peaks although ordering or charge fractionalization are absent. At low temperatures, local antiferromagnetic correlations emerge. In the doped case, we find that the Fermi surface exceeds the Luttinger volume. The breakdown of Luttinger's theorem in the underdoped regime is traced both to the dynamically generated Mott gap as well to a nonvanishing of the imaginary part of the self-energy at the Fermi level. Spectral weight transfer across the Mott gap also emerges as a ubiquitous feature of a doped Mott insulator and suggests that high- and low-energy scales are inseparable. Additionally in the underdoped regime, we find that a pseudogap exists in the single-particle density of states as well as in the heat capacity. The pseudogap (which is set by the energy scale
t2/U) is argued to be a ubiquitous feature of a lightly doped Mott state and simply represents the fact that hole transport involves double occupancy. In analogy with the Mott gap and antiferromagnetism, we propose that ordering may also accompany the formation of a pseudogap. We suggest a current pattern within a one-band model that preserves translational but breaks time-reversal symmetry along the canonical x and y axes but not along $x=\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}y$ that is consistent with the experimental observations. Finally, we show that the Hall coefficient in a doped Mott insulator must change sign at a doping level
x<1/3. The sign change is tied to a termination of strong correlation physics in the doped Mott state.
Abstract How a Mott insulator develops into a weakly coupled metal upon doping is a central question to understanding various emergent correlated phenomena. To analyze this evolution and its connection to the high-Tc cuprates, we study the single-particle spectrum for the doped Hubbard model using cluster perturbation theory on superclusters. Starting from extremely low doping, we identify a heavily renormalized quasiparticle dispersion that immediately develops across the Fermi level, and a weakening polaronic side band at higher binding energy. The quasiparticle spectral weight roughly grows at twice the rate of doping in the low doping regime, but this rate is halved at optimal doping. In the heavily doped regime, we find both strong electron-hole asymmetry and a persistent presence of Mott spectral features. Finally, we discuss the applicability of the single-band Hubbard model to describe the evolution of nodal spectra measured by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) on the single-layer cuprate La2−xSrxCuO4 (0 ≤ x ≤ 0.15). This work benchmarks the predictive power of the Hubbard model for electronic properties of high-Tc cuprates.
We show that doped Mott insulators such as the copper-oxide superconductors are asymptotically slaved in that the quasiparticle weight Z near half-filling depends critically on the existence of the high-energy scale set by the upper Hubbard band. In particular, near half-filling, the following dichotomy arises: Z not equal to 0 when the high-energy scale is integrated out but Z=0 in the thermodynamic limit when it is retained. Slavery to the high-energy scale arises from quantum interference between electronic excitations across the Mott gap. Broad spectral features seen in photoemission in the normal state of the cuprates are argued to arise from high-energy slavery.