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arXiv:cond-mat/9903340 · Physical Review Letters

Possible New Phase of Commensurate Insulators with Disorder: The Mott Glass

E. Orignac, Thierry Giamarchi, Pierre Le Doussal

Published Sep 20, 1999• 40 citations
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Abstract

A new thermodynamic phase resulting from the competition between a commensurate potential and disorder in interacting fermionic or bosonic systems is predicted. It requires interactions of finite extent. This phase, intermediate between the Mott insulator and the Anderson insulator, is both incompressible and has no gap in the conductivity. The corresponding phase is also predicted for commensurate classical elastic systems in the presence of correlated disorder.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.83.2378

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Physical review. B, Condensed matter•Jul 1, 1989•3,511 citations
A new thermodynamic phase resulting from the competition between a commensurate potential and disorder in interacting fermionic or bosonic systems is predicted. It requires interactions of finite extent. This phase, intermediate between the Mott insulator and the Anderson insulator, is both incompressible and has no gap in the conductivity. The corresponding phase is also predicted for commensurate classical elastic systems in the presence of correlated disorder.
We study the competition between a random potential and a commensurate potential on interacting fermionic and bosonic systems using a variety of methods. We focus on one-dimensional interacting fermionic systems, but higher-dimensional bosonic and fermionic extensions, as well as classical equivalents, are also discussed. Our methods, which include the bosonization method, the replica variational method, the functional renormalization group method, and perturbation around the atomic limit, go beyond conventional perturbative expansions around the Luttinger liquid in one dimension. All these methods agree on the prediction in these systems of a phase, the Mott glass, intermediate between the Anderson (compressible, with a pseudogap in the optical conductivity) and the Mott (incompressible with a gap in the optical conductivity) insulator. The Mott glass, which was unexpected from a perturbative renormalization-group point of view has a pseudogap in the conductivity while remaining incompressible. Having derived the existence of a Mott glass phase in one dimension, we show qualitatively that its existence can also be expected in higher dimensions. We discuss the relevance of this phase to experimental systems such as disordered classical elastic systems and dirty bosons.
We study the competition between the Mott and the Anderson insulating state in a one-dimensional disordered fermionic system. The notorious difficulties associated with strong coupling phases are avoided by using a new description in terms of the kink energies (or instanton surface tension) of the electronic displacement pattern. The approach has some similarities to the description of the flat phase of surfaces undergoing a roughening transition. Tracing back both a finite compressibility and a nonzero ac conductivity to vanishing kink energy we exclude the existence of an intermediate Mott-glass phase in systems with short range interaction only. In systems with long range interaction the Anderson insulating phase exhibits the features of a Mott glass however. The phase diagram is constructed from combining the information from the renormalization group flow, the kink energy, and simple rescaling analysis.
We study a one-dimensional disordered quantum fluid with linearly confining interactions (disordered Schwinger model) using bosonization and the nonperturbative functional renormalization group. We find that the long-range interactions make the Anderson-insulator (or, for bosons, the Bose-glass) fixed point (corresponding to a compressible state with a gapless optical conductivity) unstable, even if the latter may control the flow at intermediate energy scales. The stable fixed point describes an incompressible ground state with a gapped optical conductivity similar to a Mott insulator. These results disagree with the Gaussian variational method that predicts a Mott glass, namely a state with vanishing compressibility but a gapless optical conductivity.
The interplay between Anderson localization and Mott localization is considered in the vicinity of one dimension for a collection of interacting spinless fermions or repulsive bosons. We demonstrate that in the absence of commensurability effects an Anderson localization transition does take place for d\ensuremath{\le}1. It is characterized by a critical dynamical exponent z having value z=2-d for d\ensuremath{\rightarrow}1-0, in disagreement with the previous claims that z always equals d. We find that there is only a localized phase for d>1 and expect that this similarity between free fermions and interacting quantum particles will be valid up to two dimensions. We also consider the competition between the effects of commensurability, disorder, and interaction in exactly one dimension. The outcome strongly depends on the order of umklapp scattering responsible for the formation of the Mott insulator in the pure case. If it is \ensuremath{\Delta}k=2kF{\mathit{k}}_{\mathit{F}}kF​ scattering and the disorder is sufficiently weak, the Mott phase survives and the Anderson phase intervenes almost everywhere between the Mott insulator and the conductor, except at one special symmetry-enhanced point corresponding to the fixed commensurate filling: here, as in the pure case, the Mott transition belongs to the Kosterlitz-Thouless universality class. For sufficiently strong disorder, or for any disorder and higher-order scattering, the path from the Mott insulator phase (if it survives) to the conductor always crosses the Anderson phase.
The phase diagrams and phase transitions of bosons with short-ranged repulsive interactions moving in periodic and/or random external potentials at zero temperature are investigated with emphasis on the superfluid-insulator transition induced by varying a parameter such as the density. Bosons in periodic potentials (e.g., on a lattice) at T=0 exhibit two types of phases: a superfluid phase and Mott insulating phases characterized by integer (or commensurate) boson densities, by the existence of a gap for particle-hole excitations, and by zero compressibility. Generically, the superfluid onset transition in d dimensions from a Mott insulator to superfluidity is ``ideal,'' or mean field in character, but at special multicritical points with particle-hole symmetry it is in the universality class of the (d+1)-dimensional XY model. In the presence of disorder, a third, ``Bose glass'' phase exists. This phase is insulating because of the localization effects of the randomness and analogous to the Fermi glass phase of interacting fermions in a strongly disordered potential.The Bose glass phase is characterized by a finite compressibility, no gap, but an infinite superfluid susceptibility. In the presence of disorder the transition to superfluidity is argued to occur only from the Bose glass phase, and never directly from the Mott insulator. This zero-temperature superfluid-insulator transition is studied via generalizations of the Josephson scaling relation for the superfluid density at the ordinary \ensuremath{\lambda} transition, highlighting the crucial role of quantum fluctuations. The transition is found to have a dynamic critical exponent z exactly equal to d and correlation length and order-parameter correlation exponents \ensuremath{\nu} and \ensuremath{\eta} which satisfy the bounds \ensuremath{\nu}\ensuremath{\ge}2/d and \ensuremath{\eta}\ensuremath{\le}2-d, respectively. It is argued that the superfluid-insulator transition in the presence of disorder may have an upper critical dimension dc{d}_{c}dc​ which is infinite, but a perturbative renormalization-group calculation wherein the critical exponents have mean-field values for weak disorder above d=4 is also discussed. Many of these conclusions are verified by explicit calculations on a model of one-dimensional bosons in the presence of both random and periodic potentials. The general results are applied to experiments on 4He^{4}\mathrm{He}4He absorbed in porous media such as Vycor. Some measurable properties of the superfluid onset are predicted exactly [e.g., the exponent x relating the \ensuremath{\lambda} transition temperature to the zero-temperature superfluid density is found to be d/2(d-1)], while stringent bounds are placed on others. Analysis of preliminary data is consistent with these predictions.