No Arabic abstract
Systematic pressure- and temperature-dependent infrared studies on the two-dimensional organic quantum spin-liquid $beta^{prime}$-EtMe$_3$Sb[Pd(dmit)$_2$]$_2$ disclose the electronic and lattice evolution across the Mott insulator-metal transition. Increasing hydrostatic pressure continuously suppresses the insulating ground state; for $p>0.6$~GPa, a Drude-like component develops indicating the appearance of coherent quasiparticles at the Fermi level. In the vicinity of the Mott transition, not only the electronic state changes rapidly, but also the vibration modes exhibit a jump both in frequency and Fano constant, underlining the strong coupling between lattice and electrons. The anisotropy of the in-plane optical response becomes inverted above 0.6~GPa. The findings are discussed in detail and summarized in a phase diagram comprising different experimental approaches.
We investigate the role of generic scale invariance in a Mott transition from a U(1) spin-liquid insulator to a Landau Fermi-liquid metal, where there exist massless degrees of freedom in addition to quantum critical fluctuations. Here, the Mott quantum criticality is described by critical charge fluctuations, and additional gapless excitations are U(1) gauge-field fluctuations coupled to a spinon Fermi surface in the spin-liquid state, which turn out to play a central role in the Mott transition. An interesting feature of this problem is that the scaling dimension of effective leading local interactions between critical charge fluctuations differs from that of the coupling constant between U(1) gauge fields and matter-field fluctuations in the presence of a Fermi surface. As a result, there appear dangerously irrelevant operators, which can cause conceptual difficulty in the implementation of renormalization group (RG) transformations. Indeed, we find that the curvature term along the angular direction of the spinon Fermi surface is dangerously irrelevant at this spin-liquid Mott quantum criticality, responsible for divergence of the self-energy correction term in U(1) gauge-field fluctuations. Performing the RG analysis in the one-loop level based on the dimensional regularization method, we reveal that such extremely overdamped dynamics of U(1) gauge-field fluctuations, which originates from the emergent one-dimensional dynamics of spinons, does not cause any renormalization effects to the effective dynamics of both critical charge fluctuations and spinon excitations. However, it turns out that the coupling between U(1) gauge-field fluctuations and both matter-field excitations still persists at this Mott transition, which results in novel mean-field dynamics to explain the nature of the spin-liquid Mott quantum criticality.
More than half a century after first being proposed by Sir Nevill Mott, the deceptively simple question of whether the interaction-driven electronic metal-insulator transition may be continuous remains enigmatic. Recent experiments on two-dimensional materials suggest that when the insulator is a quantum spin liquid, lack of magnetic long-range order on the insulating side may cause the transition to be continuous, or only very weakly first order. Motivated by this, we study a half-filled extended Hubbard model on a triangular lattice strip geometry. We argue, through use of large-scale numerical simulations and analytical bosonization, that this model harbors a continuous (Kosterlitz-Thouless-like) quantum phase transition between a metal and a gapless spin liquid characterized by a spinon Fermi surface, i.e., a spinon metal. These results may provide a rare insight into the development of Mott criticality in strongly interacting two-dimensional materials and represent one of the first numerical demonstrations of a Mott insulating quantum spin liquid phase in a genuinely electronic microscopic model.
A Dirac-Fermi liquid (DFL)--a doped system with Dirac spectrum--is an important example of a non-Galilean-invariant Fermi liquid (FL). Real-life realizations of a DFL include, e.g., doped graphene, surface states of three-dimensional (3D) topological insulators, and 3D Dirac/Weyl metals. We study the optical conductivity of a DFL arising from intraband electron-electron scattering. It is shown that the effective current relaxation rate behaves as $1/tau_{J}propto left(omega^2+4pi^2 T^2right)left(3omega^2+8pi^2 T^2right)$ for $max{omega, T}ll mu$, where $mu$ is the chemical potential, with an additional logarithmic factor in two dimensions. In graphene, the quartic form of $1/tau_{J}$ competes with a small FL-like term, $proptoomega^2+4pi^2 T^2$, due to trigonal warping of the Fermi surface. We also calculated the dynamical charge susceptibility, $chi_mathrm{c}({bf q},omega)$, outside the particle-hole continua and to one-loop order in the dynamically screened Coulomb interaction. For a 2D DFL, the imaginary part of $chi_mathrm{c}({bf q},omega)$ scales as $q^2omegaln|omega|$ and $q^4/omega^3$ for frequencies larger and smaller than the plasmon frequency at given $q$, respectively. The small-$q$ limit of $mathrm{Im} chi_mathrm{c}({bf q},omega)$ reproduces our result for the conductivity via the Einstein relation.
Neutron scattering is used to study magnetic field induced ordering in the quasi-1D quantum spin-tube compound Sul--Cu$_2$Cl$_4$ that in zero field has a non-magnetic spin-liquid ground state. The experiments reveal an incommensurate chiral high-field phase stabilized by a geometric frustration of the magnetic interactions. The measured critical exponents $betaapprox0.235$ and $ uapprox0.34$ at $H_capprox3.7$ T point to an unusual sub-critical scaling regime and may reflect the chiral nature of the quantum critical point.
Resorting to a recently developed theoretical device called dimensional regularization for quantum criticality with a Fermi surface, we examine a metal-insulator quantum phase transition from a Landaus Fermi-liquid state to a U(1) spin-liquid phase with a spinon Fermi surface in two dimensions. Unfortunately, we fail to approach the spin-liquid Mott quantum critical point from the U(1) spin-liquid state within the dimensional regularization technique. Self-interactions between charge fluctuations called holons are not screened, which shows a run-away renormalization group flow, interpreted as holons remain gapped. This leads us to consider another fixed point, where the spinon Fermi surface can be destabilized across the Mott transition. Based on this conjecture, we reveal the nature of the spin-liquid Mott quantum critical point: Dimensional reduction to one dimension occurs for spin dynamics described by spinons. As a result, Landau damping for both spin and charge dynamics disappear in the vicinity of the Mott quantum critical point. When the flavor number of holons is over its critical value, an interacting fixed point appears to be identified with an inverted XY universality class, controlled within the dimensional regularization technique. On the other hand, a fluctuation-driven first order metal-insulator transition results when it is below the critical number. We propose that the destabilization of a spinon Fermi surface and the emergence of one-dimensional spin dynamics near the spin-liquid Mott quantum critical point can be checked out by spin susceptibility with a $2 k_{F}$ transfer momentum, where $k_{F}$ is a Fermi momentum in the U(1) spin-liquid state: The absence of Landau damping in U(1) gauge fluctuations gives rise to a divergent behavior at zero temperature while it vanishes in the presence of a spinon Fermi surface.