We study the ground-state properties of the geometrically frustrated Hubbard model on the anisotropic checkerboard lattice with nearest-neighbor hopping
t and next-nearest-neighbor hopping ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}$. By using the path-integral renormalization-group method, we study the phase diagram in the parameter space of the Hubbard interaction
U and the frustration-control parameter ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}/t$. Close examinations of the effective hopping, the double occupancy, the momentum distribution, and the spin- and charge-correlation functions allow us to determine the phase diagram at zero temperature, at which the plaquette-singlet insulator emerges besides the antiferromagnetic insulator and the paramagnetic metal. Spin-liquid insulating states without any kind of symmetry breaking cannot be found in our frustrated model.
Unique features of the nonmagnetic insulator phase are revealed, and the phase diagram of the $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}{t}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ Hubbard model containing the diagonal transfers ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ on a square lattice is presented. Using the path-integral renormalization group method, we find an antiferromagnetic phase for small next-nearest-neighbor transfer ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ and a stripe (or collinear) phase for large ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ in the Mott insulating region of the strong on-site interaction
U. For intermediate ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}∕t\ensuremath{\sim}0.7$ at large
U∕t>7, we find a longer-period antiferromagnetic-insulator phase with $2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}4$ structure. In the Mott insulating region, we also find a quantum spin liquid (in other words, a nonmagnetic insulator) phase near the Mott transition to paramagnetic metals for the $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}{t}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ Hubbard model on the square lattice as well as on the anisotropic triangular lattice. Correlated electrons often crystallize to the Mott insulator usually with some magnetic orders, whereas the ``quantum spin liquid" has been a long-sought issue. We report numerical evidence that a nonmagnetic insulating phase gets stabilized near the Mott transition with remarkable properties: The two-dimensional Mott insulators on geometrically frustrated lattices contain a phase with gapless spin excitations and degeneracy of the ground state in the whole Brillouin zone of the total momentum. The obtained vanishing spin renormalization factor suggests that spin excitations do not propagate coherently in contrast to conventional phases, where there exist either magnons in symmetry-broken phases or particle-hole excitations in paramagnetic metals. It imposes a constraint on the possible pictures of quantum spin liquids and supports an interpretation for the existence of an unconventional quantum liquid. The present concept is useful in analyzing a variety of experimental results in frustrated magnets including organic BEDT-TTF compounds and
3He atoms adsorbed on graphite.
We investigate the ground-state phase diagram of the half-filled one-dimensional Hubbard model with next-nearest-neighbor hopping using the density-matrix renormalization-group technique as well as an unrestricted Hartree-Fock approximation. We find commensurate and incommensurate disordered magnetic insulating phases and a spin-gapped metallic phase in addition to the one-dimensional Heisenberg phase. At large on-site Coulomb repulsion U, we make contact with the phase diagram of the frustrated Heisenberg chain, which has spin-gapped phases for sufficiently large frustration. For weak U, sufficiently large next-nearest-neighbor hopping
t2 leads to a band structure with four Fermi points rather than two, producing a spin-gapped metallic phase. As U is increased in this regime, the system undergoes a Mott-Hubbard transition to a frustrated antiferromagnetic insulator.
Numerical studies on Mott transitions caused by the control of the ratio between bandwidth and electron-electron interaction (
U) are reported. By using the recently proposed path-integral renormalization group(PIRG) algorithm, physical properties near the transitions in the ground state of two-dimensional half-filled models with the nearest and the next-nearest neighbor transfers (
−t and
t′, respectively) are studied as a prototype of geometrically frustrated system. The nature of the bandwidth-control transitions shows sharp contrast with that of the filling-control transitions: First, the metal-insulator and magnetic transitions are separated each other and the metal-insulator (MI) transition occurs at smaller
U, although the both transition interactions
U increase with increasing
t′. Both transitions do not contradict the first-order transitions for smaller
t′/t while the MI transitions become continuous type accompanied by emergence of {\it unusual metallic phase} near the transition for large
t′/t. A nonmagnetic insulator phase is stabilized between MI and AF transitions. The region of the nonmagnetic insulator becomes wider with increasing
t′/t. The phase diagram naturally connects two qualitatively different limits, namely the Hartree-Fock results at small
t′/t and speculations in the strong coupling Heisenberg limit.
Employing extensive cellular dynamical mean-field theory calculations with an exact diagonalization impurity solver, we investigate the ground-state phase diagrams and nonmagnetic metal-insulator transitions of the half-filled Hubbard model on two plaquette (the 1/5 depleted and checkerboard) square lattices. We identify three different insulators in the phase diagrams: dimer insulator, antiferromagnetic insulator, and plaquette insulator. We also demonstrate that the plaquette insulator is a novel fragile Mott insulator (FMI) which features a nontrivial one-dimensional irreducible representation of the
C4v crystalline point group and cannot be adiabatically connected to any band insulator with time-reversal symmetry. Furthermore, we study the nonmagnetic quantum phase transitions from the metal to the FMI and find that this Mott metal-insulator transition is characterized by the splitting of the noninteracting bands due to interaction effects.
In a half-filled Hubbard model on a square lattice, the next-nearest-neighbor hopping causes spin frustration, and the collinear antiferromagnetic (CAF) state appears as the ground state with suitable parameters. We find that there is a metal-insulator transition in the CAF state at a critical on-site repulsion. When the repulsion is small, the CAF state is metallic, and a van Hove singularity can be close to the Fermi surface, resulting in either a kink or a discontinuity in the magnetic moment. When the on-site repulsion is large, the CAF state is a Mott insulator. A first-order transition from the CAF phase to the antiferromagnetic phase and a second-order phase transition from the CAF phase to the paramagnetic phase are obtained in the phase diagram at zero temperature.