We consider a one-dimensional system of electrons interacting via a short-range repulsion and coupled to phonons close to the metal-insulator transition at half-filling. We argue that the metal-insulator transition can be described as a standard one-dimensional incommensurate to commensurate transition, even if the electronic system is coupled to the lattice distortion. By making use of known results for this transition, we prove that low-momentum phonons, with the inclusion of the 4kF (≃2π near half-filling) scattering, do not play any relevant role close to the metal-insulator transition, unless their coupling to the electrons is large in comparison with the other energy scales present in the problem. In other words the effective strength of the low-momentum transferred electron-phonon coupling does not increase close to the metal-insulator transition, even though the effective velocity of the mobile carriers is strongly diminished.
The role of the electron-phonon interaction in the Holstein-Hubbard model is investigated in the metallic phase close to the Mott transition and in the insulating Mott phase. The model is studied by means of a variational slave boson technique. At half-filling, mean-field static quantities are in good agreement with the results obtained by numerical techniques. By taking into account Gaussian fluctuations, an analytic expression of the spectral density is derived in the Mott insulating phase showing that an increase of the electron-phonon coupling leads to a sensitive reduction of the Mott gap through a reduced effective repulsion. The relation of the results with recent experimental observations in strongly correlated systems is discussed.
We study the one-dimensional Holstein model with spin-
21 electrons at half filling. Ground-state properties are calculated for long chains with great accuracy using the density-matrix renormalization-group method and extrapolated to the thermodynamic limit. We show that for small electron-phonon coupling or large phonon frequency, the insulating Peierls ground state predicted by mean-field theory is destroyed by quantum lattice fluctuations and that the system remains in a metallic phase with a nondegenerate ground state and power-law electronic and phononic correlations. When the electron-phonon coupling becomes large or the phonon frequency small, the system undergoes a transition to an insulating Peierls phase with a twofold degenerate ground state, long-range charge-density-wave order, a dimerized lattice structure, and a gap in the electronic excitation spectrum.
The Hubbard-Holstein model describes fermions on a discrete lattice, with on-site repulsion between fermions and a coupling to phonons that are localized on sites. Generally, at half-filling, increasing the coupling
g to the phonons drives the system towards a Peierls charge density wave state, whereas increasing the electron-electron interaction
U drives the fermions into a Mott antiferromagnet. At low
g and
U, or when doped, the system is metallic. In one dimension, using quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we study the case where fermions have a long-range coupling to phonons, with characteristic range $\ensuremath{\xi}$, interpolating between the Holstein and Fr\"ohlich limits. Without electron-electron interaction, the fermions adopt a Peierls state when the coupling to the phonons is strong enough. This state is destabilized by a small coupling range $\ensuremath{\xi}$ and leads to a collapse of the fermions, and, consequently, phase separation. Increasing interaction
U will drive any of these three phases (metallic, Peierls, phase separation) into a Mott insulator phase. The phase separation region is once again present in the $U\ensuremath{\ne}0$ case, even for small values of the coupling range.
Asymptotic properties of nearly half-filled one-dimensional conductors coupled with phonons are studied through a renormalization-group method. Due to spin-charge coupling via an electron-phonon interaction, the spin correlation varies with filling as well as the charge correlation. Depending on the relation between cutoff energy scales of the umklapp process and of the electron-phonon interaction, various phases appear. We find a metallic phase with a spin gap and a dominant charge-density-wave correlation near half filling between a gapless density-wave phase (like in the doped repulsive Hubbard model) and a superconductor phase with a spin gap. The spin gap is produced by phonon-assisted backward scatterings that interfere with the umklapp process constructively or destructively depending on the character of electron-phonon coupling. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
We study the quantum phase transition from an insulator to a metal realized at t'=t'_c > 0.5t in the ground state of the half-filled Hubbard chain with both nearest-neighbor (t) and next-nearest-neighbor (t') hopping. The study is carried out using the bosonization approach and density matrix renormalization group calculations. An effective low-energy Hamiltonian that describes the insulator-metal transition is derived. We find that the gross features of the phase diagram are well-described by the standard theory of commensurate-incommensurate transitions in a wide range of parameters. We also obtain an analytical expression for the insulator-metal transition line t'_c(U,t). We argue that close to the insulator-metal transition line, a crossover to a regime corresponding to an infinite-order transition takes place.We present results of density-matrix-renormalization-group calculations of spin and charge distribution in various sectors of the phase diagram. The numerical results support the picture derived from the effective theory and give evidence for the complete separation of the transitions involving spin and charge degrees of freedom.
We re-examine the Peierls insulator to Mott insulator transition scenario in the one-dimensional Holstein-Hubbard model where, at half-filling, electron-phonon and electron-electron interactions compete for establishing charge- and spin-density-wave states, respectively. By means of large-scale density-matrix renormalization group calculations we determine the spin, single-particle and two-particle excitation gaps and prove —in the course of a careful finite-size scaling analysis— recent claims for an intervening metallic phase in the weak-coupling regime. We show that for large phonon frequencies the metallic region is even more extended than previously expected, and subdivided into ordinary Luttinger-liquid and bipolaronic-liquid phases.