Some of the properties of the low-dimensional electronically correlated materials cgo and vo are discussed. The emphasis lies on recent results obtained using Raman scattering and optical absorption spectroscopy as a function of temperature, magnetic field and hydrostatic pressure.
The search for semiconductors with high thermoelectric figure of merit has been greatly aided by theoretical modeling of electron and phonon transport, both in bulk materials and in nanocomposites. Recent experiments have studied thermoelectric transport in ``strongly correlated materials derived by doping Mott insulators, whose insulating behavior without doping results from electron-electron repulsion, rather than from band structure as in semiconductors. Here a unified theory of electrical and thermal transport in the atomic and ``Heikes limit is applied to understand recent transport experiments on sodium cobaltate and other doped Mott insulators at room temperature and above. For optimal electron filling, a broad class of narrow-bandwidth correlated materials are shown to have power factors (the electronic portion of the thermoelectric figure of merit) as high at and above room temperature as in the best semiconductors.
Combining the density functional theory (DFT) and the Gutzwiller variational approach, a LDA+Gutzwiller method is developed to treat the correlated electron systems from {it ab-initio}. All variational parameters are self-consistently determined from total energy minimization. The method is computationally cheaper, yet the quasi-particle spectrum is well described through kinetic energy renormalization. It can be applied equally to the systems from weakly correlated metals to strongly correlated insulators. The calculated results for SrVO$_3$, Fe, Ni and NiO, show dramatic improvement over LDA and LDA+U.
We study low-dimensional quantum systems with analytical and computational methods. Firstly, the one-dimensional extended $t$-$V$ model of fermions with interactions of a finite range is investigated. The model exhibits a phase transition between liquid and insulating regimes. We use various analytical approaches to generalise previous theoretical studies. We devise a strong coupling expansion to go beyond first-order perturbation theory. The method is insensitive to the presence or the lack of integrability of the system. We extract the ground state energy and critical parameters of the model near the Mott insulating commensurate density. We also study the possible charge-density-wave phases that exist when the model is at the critical density. Secondly, we investigate Mott-Wannier complexes of two (excitons), three (trions) and four (biexcitons) charge carriers in two-dimensional semiconductors. Our study also includes impurity-bound complexes. We provide a classification of trions and biexcitons in transition-metal dichalcogenides, which incorporates the difference of spin polarisation between molybdenum- and tungsten-based materials. Using the diffusion Monte Carlo method, which is statistically exact for these systems, we extract binding energies of the complexes for a complete set of parameters of the model. Our results are compared with theoretical and experimental work on transition-metal dichalcogenides. An agreement is found for excitonic and trionic results, but we also observe a large discrepancy in the theoretical biexcitonic binding energies as compared to the experimental values. Possible reasons for this are outlined. We also calculate contact pair densities, which in the future can be used in the determination of the contact interaction.
The cost of the exact solution of the many-electron problem is believed to be exponential in the number of degrees of freedom, necessitating approximations that are controlled and accurate but numerically tractable. In this paper, we show that one of these approximations, the self-energy embedding theory (SEET), is derivable from a universal functional and therefore implicitly satisfies conservation laws and thermodynamic consistency. We also show how other approximations, such as the dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) and its combinations with many-body perturbation theory, can be understood as a special case of SEET and discuss how the additional freedom present in SEET can be used to obtain systematic convergence of results.
We propose a cellular version of dynamical-mean field theory which gives a natural generalization of its original single-site construction and is formulated in different sets of variables. We show how non-orthogonality of the tight-binding basis sets enters the problem and prove that the resulting equations lead to manifestly causal self energies.