No Arabic abstract
In Mott insulators, the strong electron-electron Coulomb repulsion prevents metallicity and charge excitations are gapped. In dimensions greater than one, their spins are usually ordered antiferromagnetically at low temperatures. Geometrical frustrations can destroy this long-range order, leading to exotic quantum spin liquid (QSL) states. However, their magnetic ground states have been a long-standing mystery. Here we show that a QSL state in the organic Mott insulator EtMe$_3$Sb[Pd(dmit)$_2$]$_2$ with two-dimensional triangular lattice has Pauli-paramagnetic-like low-energy excitations, which are a hallmark of itinerant fermions. Our torque magnetometry down to low temperatures (30 mK) up to high fields (32 T) reveal distinct residual paramagnetic susceptibility comparable to that in a half-filled two-dimensional metal. This demonstrates that the system is in a magnetically gapless ground state, a critical state with infinite magnetic correlation length. Moreover, our results are robust against deuteration, pointing toward the emergence of an extended `quantum critical phase, in which low-energy spin excitations behave as in paramagnetic metals with Fermi surface, despite the frozen charge degree of freedom.
How a Mott insulator develops into a weakly coupled metal upon doping is a central question to understanding various emergent correlated phenomena. To analyze this evolution and its connection to the high-$T_c$ cuprates, we study the single-particle spectrum for the doped Hubbard model using cluster perturbation theory on superclusters. Starting from extremely low doping, we identify a heavily renormalized quasiparticle dispersion that immediately develops across the Fermi level, and a weakening polaronic side band at higher binding energy. The quasiparticle spectral weight roughly grows at twice the rate of doping in the low doping regime, but this rate is halved at optimal doping. In the heavily doped regime, we find both strong electron-hole asymmetry and a persistent presence of Mott spectral features. Finally, we discuss the applicability of the single-band Hubbard model to describe the evolution of nodal spectra measured by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) on the single-layer cuprate La$_{2-x}$Sr$_x$CuO$_4$ ($0 le x le 0.15$). This work benchmarks the predictive power of the Hubbard model for electronic properties of high-$T_c$ cuprates.
Whether or not anomalies in the thermal conductivity from insulating cuprates can be attributed to antiferromagnetic order and magnons in a 2D Mott insulator remains an intriguing open question. To shed light on this issue, we investigate the thermal conductivity $kappa$ and specific heat $c_v$ of the half-filled 2D single-band Hubbard model using the numerically exact determinant quantum Monte Carlo algorithm and maximum entropy analytic continuation. Both $c_v$ and $kappa$ possess two peaks as a function of temperature, with scales related to the Hubbard interaction energy $U$ and spin superexchange energy $J$, respectively. At low temperatures where the charge degrees of freedom are gapped-out, our results for the contribution to both $c_v$ and the Drude weight associated with $kappa$ from the kinetic energy agree well with spin-wave theory for the spin-$frac{1}{2}$ antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model.
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.
We show that lightly doped holes will be self-trapped in an antiferromagnetic spin background at low-temperatures, resulting in a spontaneous translational symmetry breaking. The underlying Mott physics is responsible for such novel self-localization of charge carriers. Interesting transport and dielectric properties are found as the consequences, including large doping-dependent thermopower and dielectric constant, low-temperature variable-range-hopping resistivity, as well as high-temperature strange-metal-like resistivity, which are consistent with experimental measurements in the high-T$_c$ cuprates. Disorder and impurities only play a minor and assistant role here.
We show that a single impurity embedded in a cold atom bosonic Mott insulator leads to a novel polaron that exhibits correlated motion with an effective mass and a linear size that nearly diverge at critical value of the on-site impurity-boson interaction strength. Cold atom technology can tune the polarons properties and break up the composite particle into a deconfined impurity-hole and boson particle state at finite, controllable polaron momentum.