No Arabic abstract
At the Mott transition, electron-electron interaction changes a metal, in which electrons are itinerant, to an insulator, in which electrons are localized. This phenomenon is central to quantum materials. Here we contribute to its understanding by studying the two-dimensional Hubbard model at finite temperature with plaquette cellular dynamical mean-field theory. We provide an exhaustive thermodynamic description of the correlation-driven Mott transition of the half-filled model by calculating pressure, charge compressibility, entropy, kinetic energy, potential energy and free energy across the first-order Mott transition and its high-temperature crossover (Widom line). The entropy is extracted from the Gibbs-Duhem relation and shows complex behavior near the transition, marked by discontinuous jumps at the first-order boundary, singular behavior at the Mott endpoint and inflections marking sharp variations in the supercritical region. The free energy allows us to identify the thermodynamic phase boundary, to discuss phases stability and metastability, and to touch upon nucleation and spinodal decomposition mechanisms for the transition. We complement this thermodynamic description of the Mott transition by an information-theoretic description. We achieve this by calculating the local entropy, which is a measure of entanglement, and the single-site total mutual information, which quantifies quantum and classical correlations. These information-theoretic measures exhibit characteristic behaviors that allow us to identify the first-order coexistence regions, the Mott critical endpoint and the crossovers along the Widom line in the supercritical region.
Entanglement and information are powerful lenses to probe phases transitions in many-body systems. Motivated by recent cold atom experiments, which are now able to measure the corresponding information-theoretic quantities, we study the Mott transition in the half-filled two-dimensional Hubbard model using cellular dynamical mean-field theory, and focus on two key measures of quantum correlations: entanglement entropy and mutual information. We show that they detect the first-order nature of the transition, the universality class of the endpoint, and the crossover emanating from the endpoint.
Tools of quantum information theory offer a new perspective to characterize phases and phase transitions in interacting many-body quantum systems. The Hubbard model is the archetypal model of such systems and can explain rich phenomena of quantum matter with minimal assumptions. Recent measurements of entanglement-related properties of this model using ultracold atoms in optical lattices hint that entanglement could provide the key to understanding open questions of the doped Hubbard model, including the remarkable properties of the pseudogap phase. These experimental findings call for a theoretical framework and new predictions. Here we approach the doped Hubbard model in two dimensions from the perspective of quantum information theory. We study the local entropy and the total mutual information across the doping-driven Mott transition within plaquette cellular dynamical mean-field theory. We find that upon varying doping these two entanglement-related properties detect the Mott insulating phase, the strongly correlated pseudogap phase, and the metallic phase. Imprinted in the entanglement-related properties we also find the pseudogap to correlated metal first-order transition, its finite temperature critical endpoint, and its supercritical crossovers. Through this footprint we reveal an unexpected interplay of quantum and classical correlations. Our work shows that sharp variation in the entanglement-related properties and not broken symmetry phases characterizes the onset of the pseudogap phase at finite temperature.
We consider the one-band Hubbard model on the square lattice by using variational and Greens function Monte Carlo methods, where the variational states contain Jastrow and backflow correlations on top of an uncorrelated wave function that includes BCS pairing and magnetic order. At half filling, where the ground state is antiferromagnetically ordered for any value of the on-site interaction $U$, we can identify a hidden critical point $U_{rm Mott}$, above which a finite BCS pairing is stabilized in the wave function. The existence of this point is reminiscent of the Mott transition in the paramagnetic sector and determines a separation between a Slater insulator (at small values of $U$), where magnetism induces a potential energy gain, and a Mott insulator (at large values of $U$), where magnetic correlations drive a kinetic energy gain. Most importantly, the existence of $U_{rm Mott}$ has crucial consequences when doping the system: We observe a tendency to phase separation into a hole-rich and a hole-poor region only when doping the Slater insulator, while the system is uniform by doping the Mott insulator. Superconducting correlations are clearly observed above $U_{rm Mott}$, leading to the characteristic dome structure in doping. Furthermore, we show that the energy gain due to the presence of a finite BCS pairing above $U_{rm Mott}$ shifts from the potential to the kinetic sector by increasing the value of the Coulomb repulsion.
We study the Mott transition in a frustrated Hubbard model with next-nearest neighbor hopping at half-filling. The interplay between interaction, dimensionality and geometric frustration closes the one-dimensional Mott gap and gives rise to a metallic phase with Fermi surface pockets. We argue that they emerge as a consequence of remnant one-dimensional Umklapp scattering at the momenta with vanishing interchain hopping matrix elements. In this pseudogap phase, enhanced d-wave pairing correlations are driven by antiferromagnetic fluctuations. Within the adopted cluster dynamical mean-field theory on the $8times 2$ cluster and down to our lowest temperatures the transition from one to two dimensions is continuous.
The high-temperature superconducting cuprates are governed by intertwined spin, charge, and superconducting orders. While various state-of-the-art numerical methods have demonstrated that these phases also manifest themselves in doped Hubbard models, they differ on which is the actual ground state. Finite cluster methods typically indicate that stripe order dominates while embedded quantum cluster methods, which access the thermodynamic limit by treating long-range correlations with a dynamical mean field, conclude that superconductivity does. Here, we report the observation of fluctuating spin and charge stripes in the doped single-band Hubbard model using a quantum Monte Carlo dynamical cluster approximation (DCA) method. By resolving both the fluctuating spin and charge orders using DCA, we demonstrate for the first time that they survive in the doped Hubbard model in the thermodynamic limit. This discovery also provides a new opportunity to study the influence of fluctuating stripe correlations on the models pairing correlations within a unified numerical framework.