Nonlocal effects in a model of the critical state

Malte Schüler, Erik G. C. P. van Loon, Mikhail I. Katsnelson +1 more

While the Hubbard model is the standard model to study Mott metal-insulator transitions, it is still unclear to what extent it can describe metal-insulator transitions in real solids, where nonlocal Coulomb interactions are always present. By using a variational principle, we clarify this issue for short- and long-range nonlocal Coulomb interactions for half-filled systems on bipartite lattices. We find that repulsive nonlocal interactions generally stabilize the Fermi-liquid regime. The metal-insulator phase boundary is shifted to larger interaction strengths to leading order linearly with nonlocal interactions. Importantly, nonlocal interactions can raise the order of the metal-insulator transition. We present a detailed analysis of how the dimension and geometry of the lattice as well as the temperature determine the critical nonlocal interaction leading to a first-order transition: for systems in more than two dimensions with nonzero density of states at the Fermi energy the critical nonlocal interaction is arbitrarily small; otherwise, it is finite.

Dong Xie, An Min Wang

M. P. Kawatra, J. I. Budnick

Chi‐Fai Lo

We have shown that the smallest possible singel-qubit critical coupling strength of the N-qubit two-photon Rabi model is only 1/N times that of the two-photon Rabi model. The spectral collapse can thus occur at a more attainable value of the critical coupling. For both of the two-qubit and three-qubit cases, we have also rigorously demonstrated that at the critical coupling the system not only has a set of discrete eigenenergies but also a continuous energy spectrum. The discrete eigenenergy spectrum can be derived via a simple one-to-one mapping to the bound state problem of a particle of variable effective mass in the presence of a finite potential well and a nonlocal potential. The energy difference of each qubit, which specifies both the depth of the finite potential well and the strength of the nonlocal potential, determines the number of bound states available, implying that the extent of the incomplete spectral collapse can be monitored in a straightforward manner.

Ling Qiang, Guanghua Liu, Guang-Shan Tian

The ground-state properties and quantum phase transitions (QPTs) of the one-dimensional bond-alternative XXZ model are investigated by the infinite time-evolving block decimation (iTEBD) method. The bond-alternative effects on its ground-state phase diagram are discussed in detail. Once the bond alternation is taken into account, the antiferromagnetic phase (Δ > 1) will be destroyed at a given critical point and change into a disordered phase without nonlocal string order. The QPT is shown to be second-order, and the whole phase diagram is provided. For the ferromagnetic phase region (Δ < −1), the critical point r c always equals 1 (independent of Δ), and the QPT for this case is shown to be first-order. The dimerized Heisenberg model is also discussed, and two disordered phases can be distinguished by with or without nonlocal string orders. Both the bipartite entanglement and the fidelity per site, as two kinds of model-independent measures, are capable of describing all the QPTs in such a quantum model.