We analyze the Coulomb interacting problem in undoped graphene layers by using an excitonic variational ansatz. By minimizing the energy, we derive a gap equation which reproduces and extends known results. We show that a full treatment of the exchange term, which includes the renormalization of the Fermi velocity, tends to suppress the phase transition by increasing the critical coupling at which the excitonic instability takes place.
The strong long-range Coulomb interaction between massless Dirac fermions in graphene can drive a semimetal-insulator transition. We show that this transition is strongly suppressed when the Coulomb interaction is screened by such effects as disorder, thermal fluctuation, doping, and finite volume. It is completely suppressed once the screening factor $mu$ is beyond a threshold $mu_{c}$ even for infinitely strong coupling. However, such transition is still possible if there is an additional strong contact four-fermion interaction. The differences between screened and contact interactions are also discussed.
Dirac electrons in graphene in the presence of Coulomb interactions of strength $beta$ have been shown to display power law behavior with $beta$ dependent exponents in certain correlation functions, which we call the mass susceptibilities of the system. In this work, we first discuss how this phenomenon is intimately related to the excitonic insulator transition, showing the explicit relation between the gap equation and response function approaches to this problem. We then provide a general computation of these mass susceptibilities in the ladder approximation, and present an analytical computation of the static exponent within a simplified kernel model, obtaining $eta_0 =sqrt{1-beta/beta_c}$ . Finally we emphasize that the behavior of these susceptibilities provides new experimental signatures of interactions, such as power law Kohn anomalies in the dispersion of several phonons, which could potentially be used as a measurement of $beta$.
We study the Mott transition occurring for bosonic Hubbard models in one, two, and three spatial dimensions, by means of a variational wave function benchmarked by Greens function Monte Carlo calculations. We show that a very accurate variational wave function, constructed by applying a long-range Jastrow factor to the non-interacting boson ground state, can describe the superfluid-insulator transition in any dimensionality. Moreover, by mapping the quantum averages over such a wave function into the the partition function of a classical model, important insights into the insulating phase are uncovered. Finally, the evidence in favor of anomalous scenarios for the Mott transition in two dimensions are reported whenever additional long-range repulsive interactions are added to the Hamiltonian.
We report the pressure-dependent optical reflectivity spectra of a strongly correlated insulator, samarium monosulfide (SmS), in the far- and middle-infrared regions to investigate the origin of the pressure-induced phase transition from the black phase to the golden phase. The energy gap becomes narrow with increasing pressure in the black phase. A valence transition from Sm2+ in the black phase to mainly Sm3+ in the golden phase accompanied by spectral change from insulator to metal were observed at the transition pressure of 0.65 GPa. The black-to-golden phase transition occurs when the energy gap size of black SmS becomes the same as the binding energy of the exciton at the indirect energy gap before the gap closes. This result indicates that the valence transition originates from an excitonic instability.
Using the variational cluster approach (VCA), we study the transition from the antiferromagnetic to the superconducting phase of the two-dimensional Hubbard model at zero temperature. Our calculations are based on a new method to evaluate the VCA grand potential which employs a modified Lanczos algorithm and avoids integrations over the real or imaginary frequency axis. Thereby, very accurate results are possible for cluster sizes not accessible to full diagonalization. This is important for an improved treatment of short-range correlations, including correlations between Cooper pairs in particular. We investigate the cluster-size dependence of the phase-separation tendency that has been proposed recently on the basis of calculations for smaller clusters. It is shown that the energy barrier driving the phase separation decreases with increasing cluster size. This supports the conjecture that the ground state exhibits microscopic inhomogeneities rather than macroscopic phase separation. The evolution of the single-particle spectum as a function of doping is studied in addtion and the relevance of our results for experimental findings is pointed out.