No Arabic abstract
Although the mechanism of superconductivity in the cuprates remains elusive, it is generally agreed that at the heart of the problem is the physics of doped Mott insulators. The cuprate parent compound has one unpaired electron per Cu site, and is predicted by band theory to be a half-filled metal. The strong onsite Coulomb repulsion, however, prohibits electron hopping between neighboring sites and leads to a Mott insulator ground state with antiferromagnetic (AF) ordering. Charge carriers doped into the CuO2 plane destroy the insulating phase and superconductivity emerges as the carrier density is sufficiently high. The natural starting point for tackling high Tc superconductivity is to elucidate the electronic structure of the parent Mott insulator and the behavior of a single doped charge. Here we use a scanning tunneling microscope to investigate the atomic scale electronic structure of the Ca2CuO2Cl2 parent Mott insulator of the cuprates. The full electronic spectrum across the Mott-Hubbard gap is uncovered for the first time, which reveals the particle-hole symmetric and spatially uniform Hubbard bands. A single electron donated by surface defect is found to create a broad in-gap electronic state that is strongly localized in space with spatial characteristics intimately related to the AF spin background. The unprecedented real space electronic structure of the parent cuprate sheds important new light on the origion of high Tc superconductivity from the doped Mott insulator perspective.
We use scanning tunneling microscopy to visualize the atomic-scale electronic states induced by a pair of hole dopants in Ca2CuO2Cl2 parent Mott insulator of cuprates. We find that when the two dopants approach each other, the transfer of spectral weight from high energy Hubbard band to low energy in-gap state creates a broad peak and nearly V-shaped gap around the Fermi level. The peak position shows a sudden drop at distance around 4 a0 and then remains almost constant. The in-gap states exhibit peculiar spatial distributions depending on the configuration of the two dopants relative to the underlying Cu lattice. These results shed important new lights on the evolution of low energy electronic states when a few holes are doped into parent cuprates.
Motivated by the recent development of time-resolved resonant-inelastic x-ray scattering (TRRIXS) in photoexcited antiferromagnetic Mott insulators, we numerically investigate momentum-dependent transient spin dynamics in a half-filled Hubbard model on a square lattice. After turning off a pumping photon pulse, the intensity of a dynamical spin structure factor temporally oscillates with frequencies determined by the energy of two magnons in the antiferromagnetic Mott insulator. We find an antiphase behavior in the oscillations between two orthogonal momentum directions, parallel and perpendicular to the electric field of a pump pulse. The phase difference comes from the $B_{1g}$ channel of the two-magnon excitation. Observing the antiphase oscillations will be a big challenge for TRRIXS experiments when their time resolution will be improved by more than an order of magnitude.
The evolution from an anomalous metallic phase to a Mott insulator within the two-dimensional Hubbard model is investigated by means of the Cellular Dynamical Mean-Field Theory. We show that the density-driven Mott metal-insulator transition is approached in a non-uniform way in different regions of the momentum space. This gives rise to a breakup of the Fermi surface and to the formation of hot and cold regions, whose position depends on the hole or electron like nature of the carriers in the system.
We have studied the electronic structure of the two-dimensional Heisenberg antiferromagnet VOCl using photoemission spectroscopy and density functional theory including local Coulomb repulsion. From calculated exchange integrals and the observed energy dispersions we argue that the degree of one-dimensionality regarding both the magnetic and electronic properties is noticeably reduced compared to the isostructural compounds TiOCl and TiOBr. Also, our analysis provides conclusive justification to classify VOCl as a multi-orbital Mott insulator. In contrast to the titanium based compounds density functional theory here gives a better description of the electronic structure. However, a quantitative account of the low-energy features and detailed line shapes calls for further investigations including dynamical and spatial correlations.
Metal-insulator transitions (MIT) belong to a class of fascinating physical phenomena, which includes superconductivity, and colossal magnetoresistance (CMR), that are associated with drastic modifications of electrical resistance. In transition metal compounds, MIT are often related to the presence of strong electronic correlations that drive the system into a Mott insulator state. In these systems the MIT is usually tuned by electron doping or by applying an external pressure. However, it was noted recently that a Mott insulator should also be sensitive to other external perturbations such as an electric field. We report here the first experimental evidence of a non-volatile electric-pulse-induced insulator-to-metal transition and possible superconductivity in the Mott insulator GaTa4Se8. Our Scanning Tunneling Microscopy experiments show that this unconventional response of the system to short electric pulses arises from a nanometer scale Electronic Phase Separation (EPS) generated in the bulk material.