We study the charge dynamics of the half-filled Hubbard model on the square lattice at zero temperature. We employ a slave-fermion formulation in which the charge degrees of freedom are represented by fermionic holons and doublons and the bosonic spin degrees of freedom are assumed to be described by the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model. The ground state has long-ranged magnetic (Néel) order and its Mott-insulating characteristics are the consequence of holon-doublon bound-state formation. Within this framework, we calculate the average double occupancy, the electron density of states, and the spectral function in the self-consistent Born approximation. The lower and upper Hubbard bands are reproduced, there is spectral-weight transfer into a coherent quasiparticle band at their lower edges, and the Mott gap, associated with holon-doublon binding, is renormalized due to the interactions of the holons and doublons with the magnons. We compute the zeros of the Green function at the chemical potential to discuss the Luttinger volume and show that the poles of the self-energy reflect the underlying quasiparticle dispersion with a spin-renormalized hopping parameter. Optical conductivity results relate the optical gap to the Mott gap of the insulating system. We conclude that a self-consistent treatment of the spin fluctuation effects on the charge degrees of freedom captures all the essential physics of the antiferromagnetic Mott-Hubbard insulator.
We investigate the antiferromagnetically ordered state in the half-filled Hubbard model on the Socolar dodecagonal tiling. When the interaction is introduced, the staggered magnetizations suddenly appear, which results from the existence of the macroscopically degenerate states in the tightbinding model. The increase of the interaction strength monotonically increases the magnetizations although its magnitude depends on the local environments. Magnetization profile is discussed in the perpendicular space. The similarity and difference are also addressed in magnetic properties in the Hubbard mo…
We measured magnetization, specific heat, electron spin resonance, neutron diffraction, and inelastic neutron scattering of CrVMoO$_7$ powder. An antiferromagnetically ordered state appears below $T_{\rm N} = 26.5 \pm 0.8$ K. We consider that the probable spin model for CrVMoO$_7$ is an interacting antiferromagnetic spin-$\frac{3}{2}$ dimer model. We evaluated the intradimer interaction $J$ to be $25 \pm 1$ K and the effective interdimer interaction $J_{\rm eff}$ to be $8.8 \pm 1$ K. CrVMoO$_7$ is a rare spin dimer compound that shows an antiferromagnetically ordered state at atmospheric press…
We present a functional renormalization group flow for many-fermion lattice models into phases with broken spin-rotational symmetry. The flow is expressed purely in terms of fermionic vertex functions. The symmetry breaking is seeded by a small initial anomalous self-energy which grows at the transition scale and which prevents a runaway-flow at nonzero scales. Focusing on the case of commensurate antiferromagnetism we discuss how the interaction vertex can be parametrized efficiently. For reduced models with long-range bare interactions we show the results of standard mean-field theory are re…
We report on a spin-polarized inelastic neutron scattering study of spin waves in the antiferromagnetically ordered state of BaFe2As2. Three distinct excitation components are identified, with spins fluctuating along the c-axis, perpendicular to the ordering direction in the ab-plane, and parallel to the ordering direction. While the first two "transverse" components can be described by a linear spin-wave theory with magnetic anisotropy and inter-layer coupling, the third "longitudinal" component is generically incompatible with the local moment picture. It points towards a contribution of iti…
At doping below 6% the bilayer cuprate YBa2Cu3O{6+y} is a collinear antiferromagnet. Independent of doping the value of the staggered magnetization at zero temperature is about 0.6μ_B. This is the maximum value of the magnetization allowed by quantum fluctuations of localized spins. In this low doping regime the compound is a normal conductor with a finite resistivity at zero temperature. These experimental observations create a unique opportunity for theory to perform a controlled calculation of the electron spectral function. In the present work we perform this calculation within the framewo…
We study magnetic properties in the half-filled Hubbard model on the Ammann-Beenker tiling. First, we focus on the domain structure with locally eightfold rotational symmetry to examine the strictly localized confined states for the tightbinding model. We count the number of vertices and confined states in the larger domains generated by the deflation operations systematically. Then, the fraction of the confined states, which plays an important role for magnetic properties in the weak coupling limit, is obtained as $p=1/2τ^2$, where $τ(=1+\sqrt{2})$ is the silver ratio. It is also found that t…
Ultrasound velocity measurements of the orbitally-frustrated GeCo$_2$O$_4$ reveal unusual elastic instabilities due to the phonon-spin coupling within the antiferromagnetic phase. Shear moduli exhibit anomalies arising from the coupling to short-range ferromagnetic excitations. Diplike anomalies in the magnetic-field dependence of elastic moduli reveal magnetic-field-induced orbital order-order transitions. These results strongly suggest the presence of geometrical orbital frustration which causes novel orbital phenomena within the antiferromagnetic phase.
Measurements of the static magnetization, susceptibility and ESR of Gd spin probes have been performed to study the properties of antiferromagnetically ordered La_{2-x-y}Eu_ySr_xCuO_4 (x less or equal 0.02) with the low temperature tetragonal structure. According to the static magnetic measurements the CuO_2 planes are magnetically decoupled in this structural phase. The ESR study reveals strong magnetic fluctuations at the ESR frequency which are not present in the orthorhombic phase. It is argued that this drastic enhancement of the spin fluctuations is due to a considerable weakening of the…
The nature of metallicity and the level of electronic correlations in the antiferromagnetically ordered parent compounds are two important open issues for the iron-based superconductivity. We perform a temperature-dependent angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy study of Fe1.02Te, the parent compound for iron chalcogenide superconductors. Deep in the antiferromagnetic state, the spectra exhibit a "peak-dip-hump" line shape associated with two clearly separate branches of dispersion, characteristics of polarons seen in manganites and lightly-doped cuprates. As temperature increases towards t…
We theoretically investigate the competition between charge-ordered state and Mott insulating state at finite temperatures in quarter-filled quasi-one-dimensional electron systems, by studying dimerized extended Hubbard chains with interchain Coulomb interactions. In order to take into account one-dimensional fluctuations properly, we apply the bosonization method to an effective model obtained by the interchain mean-field approximation. The results show that lattice dimerization, especially in the critical region, and frustration in the interchain Coulomb interactions reduce the charge-orderi…
Unconventional superconductivity typically emerges in the presence of quasi-degenerate ground states, and the associated intense fluctuations are likely responsible for generating the superconducting state. Here we use polarized neutron scattering to study the spin space anisotropy of spin excitations in Fe$_{1.07}$Te exhibiting bicollinear antiferromagnetic (AF) order, the parent compound of FeTe$_{1-x}$Se$_x$ superconductors. We confirm that the low energy spin excitations are transverse spin waves, consistent with a local-moment origin of the bicollinear AF order. While the ordered moments …
In this paper we study a bandwidth-controlled direct, continuous, phase transition from a Mott insulator, with easy plane Neel order, to a fully gapped $d_{x^2-y^2}$ superconductor with a doubled unit cell on the square lattice, a transition that is forbidden according to the Landau paradigm. This transition is made possible because the vortices of the antiferromagnet are charged and the vortices of the superconductor carry spins. These nontrivial vortex quantum numbers arise because the ordered phases are intimately related to a topological band insulator. We describe the lattice model as wel…
Shubnikov-De Haas effect (SdH) effect and angular dependent magnetoresistance oscillations (AMRO) were observed in the organic superconductor: $κ$-(BETS)$_2$FeBr$_4$. In contrast to its isostructural compound $κ-(BETS)$_2$FeCl$_4$, SdH oscillations, for fields perpendicular to the conducting planes, reveal three Fermi Surface (FS) closed orbits $α$, $β$, and $γ$ whose cross sectional areas are 19.8 %, 99.9 %, and 2.4 % of the first Brillouin zone, respectively. The conduction electron effective masses were found to be: $μ_α = (4.7 \pm 0.2)$ m$_e$, $μ_β = (8.0 \pm 1.0)$ m$_e$, and $μ_γ = (2.0 \…
We derive an effective Hamiltonian $H_{eff}$ for an ionic Hubbard chain, valid for $t\ll U,Δ$, where $t$ is the hopping, $U$ the Coulomb repulsion, and $Δ$ the charge transfer energy. $H_{eff}$ is the minimal model for describing the transition from the band insulator (BI) ($Δ-U\gg t$) and the Mott insulator (MI) ($U-Δ\gg t$). Using spin-particle transformations (Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{86}, 1082 (2001)), we map $H_{eff}(U=Δ)$ into an SU(3) antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model whose exact ground state is known. In this way, we show rigorously that a spontaneously dimerized insulating ferroelect…
We present an experimental study of macroscopic and microscopic magnetic anisotropy of a spin tetramer system \cso using torque magnetometry and ESR spectroscopy. Large rotation of macroscopic magnetic axes with temperature observed from torque magnetometry agrees reasonably well with the rotation of the $\mathbf{g}$ tensor above $T \gtrsim 50$~K. Below 50~K, the $\mathbf{g}$ tensor is temperature independent, while macroscopic magnetic axes continue to rotate. Additionally, the susceptibility anisotropy has a temperature dependence which cannot be reconciled with the isotropic Heisenberg mode…
We report a high-field electron spin resonance study in the sub-THz frequency domain of a single crystal of Sr$_2$IrO$_4$ that has been recently proposed as a prototypical spin-orbital Mott insulator. In the antiferromagnetically (AFM) ordered state with noncollinear spin structure that occurs in this material at $T_{\rm N} \approx 240$ K we observe both the "low" frequency mode due to the precession of weak ferromagnetic moments arising from a spin canting, and the "high" frequency modes due to the precession of the AFM sublattices. Surprisingly, the energy gap for the AFM excitations appears…
Ginzburg-Landau theory describes phase transitions as the competition between energy and entropy: The ordered phase has lower energy, while the disordered phase has larger entropy. When heating the system, ordering is reduced entropically until it vanishes at the critical temperature. This established picture implicitly assumes that the energy difference between ordered and disordered phase does not change with temperature. We show that for the Mott insulator KCuF3 this assumption is strongly violated: thermal expansion energetically stabilizes the orbitally-ordered phase to such and extent th…
A series of polycrystalline samples of Sr2-xIrO4 have been synthesized by a solid-state reaction method. The crystal structure of this doped system can be explained on the basis of the extended nature of 5d electrons and strontium vacancies in Sr2-xIrO4. The analysis of the temperature-dependent resistance of these samples reveals the semiconducting feature, where three dimensional variable range hopping behavior is observed at temperatures lower than 120K, Arrhenius type in intermediate temperatures from 140K to 200K, and two-dimensional (2D) weak localization at high temperatures from 220K t…
The Magneli phase Ti4O7 exhibits two sharp jumps in resistivity with coupled structural transitions as a function of temperature at Tc1=142 K and Tc2=154 K. We have studied electronic structure changes across the two transitions using 7 eV laser, soft x-ray and hard x-ray (HX) photoemission spectroscopy (PES). Ti 2p-3d resonant PES and HX-PES show a clear metallic Fermi-edge and mixed valency above Tc2. The low temperature phase below Tc1 shows a clear insulating gap of 100 meV. The intermediate phase between Tc1 and Tc2 indicates a pseudogap coexisting with remnant coherent states. HX-PES and…
We discuss a quantum transition from a superfluid to a Mott glass phases in disordered Bose-systems by the example of an isotropic spin-$\frac12$ antiferromagnet with spatial dimension $d\ge2$ and with disorder in tunable exchange couplings. Our analytical consideration is based on general properties of a system in critical regime, on the assumption that the magnetically order part of the system shows fractal properties near the transition, and on a hydrodynamic description of long-wavelength magnons in the magnetically ordered ("superfluide") phase. Our results are fully consistent with a sca…
We investigate the paramagnetic-metal-to-antiferromagnetic-metal and antiferromagnetic-metal-to- antiferromagnetic-insulator transitions using a slave-boson mean-field theory. To this effect, we discuss the ground state of the half-filled Hubbard model as a function of t'/t and correlation strength U, where t and t' are the hopping amplitudes between nearest and next-nearest neighbors, respectively. The metal-insulator transition at a critical U_{MIT} is of second order for small levels of magnetic frustration, t'/t<0.06, and of first order for large ones, t'/t>0.06. The insulator is always an…
Doping the distorted-perovskite Mott insulators LaTiO$_3$ and GdTiO$_3$ with a single SrO layer along the [001] direction gives rise to a rich correlated electronic structure. A realistic superlattice study by means of the charge self-consistent combination of density functional theory with dynamical mean-field theory reveals layer- and temperature-dependent multi-orbital metal-insulator transitions. An orbital-selective metallic layer at the interface dissolves via an orbital-polarized doped-Mott state into an orbital-ordered insulating regime beyond the two conducting TiO$_2$ layers. We find…
Transport and magnetic properties have been systematically investigated for SmMnAsO_{1-x} with controlled electron-doping. As the electron band-filling is increased with the increase of oxygen deficiency (x), the resistivity monotonically decreases and the transition from Mott-insulator to metal occurs between x=0.17 and 0.2. Seebeck coefficient at room temperature abruptly changes around the critical doping level from a large value (\sim -300 μV/K) to a small one (\sim -50 μV/K) both with negative sign. In the metallic compounds with x=0.2 and x=0.3, Mn spins order antiferromagnetically aroun…
The inverse Faraday effect (IFE), where a static magnetization is induced by circularly polarized light, offers a promising route to ultrafast control of spin states. Here we study the IFE in Mott insulators using the Floquet theory. We find two distinct IFE behavior governed by the inversion symmetry. In the Mott insulators with inversion symmetry, we find that the effective magnetic field induced by the IFE couples ferromagnetically to the neighboring spins. While for the Mott insulators without inversion symmetry, the effective magnetic field due to IFE couples antiferromagnetically to the …
We study charge ordering driven by Coulomb interactions on triangular lattices relevant to the Wigner-Mott transition in two dimensions. Dynamical mean-field theory reveals the pinball liquid phase, a charge ordered metallic phase containing quasi-localized (pins) coexisting with itinerant (balls) electrons. Based on an effective periodic Anderson model for this phase, we find an antiferromagnetic Kondo coupling between pins and balls and strong quasiparticle renormalization. Non-Fermi liquid behavior can occur in such charge ordered systems due to spin-flip scattering of itinerant electrons o…
We study the magnetic order and excitations in strong spin-orbit coupled, Van Vleck-type, $d^4$ Mott insulators on a square lattice. Extending the previous work, we include the tetragonal crystal field splitting and explore its effects on magnetic phase diagram and magnon spectra. Two different ordered phases, with in-plane and out-of-plane orientation of the staggered moments, are found for the higher and lower values of the crystal field splitting, respectively. The magnetic excitation spectra for paramagnetic and magnetically ordered phases are calculated and discussed in the context of a c…
The orbital-selective Mott phase (OSMP) of multiorbital Hubbard models has been extensively analyzed before using static and dynamical mean-field approximations. In parallel, the properties of Block states (antiferromagnetically coupled ferromagnetic spin clusters) in Fe-based superconductors have also been much discussed. The present effort uses numerically exact techniques in one-dimensional systems to report the observation of Block states within the OSMP regime, connecting two seemingly independent areas of research, and providing analogies with the physics of Double-Exchange models.
We have investigated the temperature evolution of magnetism and its interrelation with structural parameters in perovskite-based layered compound Sr$_2$IrO$_4$, which is believed to be a $J_{eff}$ = 1/2 Mott insulator. The structural distortion plays an important role in this material which induces a weak ferromagnetism in otherwise antiferromagnetically ordered magnetic state with transition temperature around 240 K. Interestingly, at low temperature below around 100 K, a change in magnetic moment has been observed. Temperature dependent x-ray diffraction measurements show sudden changes in s…
We investigate the half-filled two-orbital Hubbard model with the crystalline electric field using dynamical mean-field theory combined with the continuous-time quantum Monte Carlo simulations. We systematically study how the interplay of the intra- and interorbital Coulomb interations together with the Hund coupling realizes the diagonal and off-diagonal ordered states. It is found that the antiferroorbital ordered state is realized in the Hubbard model, in addition to the antiferromagnetically ordered and excitonic states. The competition between the antiferroorbital ordered and excitonic st…
Ca3Ru2O7 with a Mott-like transition at 48 K features different in-plane anisotropies of magnetization and magnetoresistance. Applying magnetic field along the magnetic easy-axis precipitates a spin-polarized state via a first-order metamagnetic transition, but does not lead to a full suppression of the Mott state, whereas applying magnetic field along the magnetic hard axis does, causing a resistivity reduction of three orders of magnitude. The colossal magnetoresistivity is attributed to the collapse of the orbital ordered and spin-polarized state. Evidence for a density wave is also present…
The double perovskite Ba$_{2}$NaOsO$_{6}$ (BNOO), an exotic example of a very high oxidation state (heptavalent) osmium $d^1$ compound and also uncommon by being a ferromagnetic Mott insulator without Jahn-Teller (JT) distortion, is modeled using the density functional theory (DFT) hybrid functional based exact exchange for correlated electrons (oeeHyb) method and including spin-orbit coupling (SOC). The experimentally observed narrow gap ferromagnetic insulating ground state is obtained, with easy axis along [110] in accord with experiment, providing support that this approach provides a real…
A central question in the high temperature cuprate superconductors is the fate of the parent Mott insulator upon charge doping. Here we use scanning tunneling microscopy to investigate the local electronic structure of lightly doped cuprate in the antiferromagnetic insulating regime. We show that the doped charge induces a spectral weight transfer from the high energy Hubbard bands to the low energy in-gap states. With increasing doping, a V-shaped density of state suppression occurs at the Fermi level, which is accompanied by the emergence of checkerboard charge order. The new STM perspective…
Quantum entanglement effects between the electronic spin and charge degrees of freedom are examined in an organic molecular solid, termed a dimer-Mott insulating system, in which molecular dimers are arranged in a crystal as fundamental units. A low energy effective model includes an antisymmetric exchange interaction, as one of the dominant magnetic interactions. This interaction favors a 90 degree spin configuration, and competes with the Heisenberg-type exchange interaction. Stabilities of the magnetic ordered phases are examined by using the spin-wave theory, as well as the Schwinger-boson…
Density order is usually a consequence of the competition between long-range and short-range interactions. Here we report a density ordered superfluid emergent from a homogeneous Mott insulator due to the competition between frustrations and local interactions. This transition is found in a Bose-Hubbard model on a frustrated triangle lattice with an extra pairing term. Further, we find a quantum phase transition between two different density ordered superfluids, which is beyond the Landau-Ginzburg paradigm. Across this transition, a U(1) symmetry is emergent, while the symmetry in each density…
We study two-component fermions in optical lattices with spatially alternating on-site interactions using dynamical mean-field theory. Calculating the quasi-particle weight, double occupancy, and order parameters for each sublattice, we discuss the low-temperature properties of the system. When both interactions are repulsive, the magnetically ordered state is realized at half-filling. In the attractive case, the superfluid state is, in general, realized with a particle number imbalance. On the other hand, when repulsive and attractive interactions are comparable in the half-filled system, the…
Realization of a Wigner-Mott insulator in 6R-TaS$_2$ superconductor
Beijing National Center for Condensed Matter Physics and Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院物理研究所（北京凝聚态物理国家研究中心））；School of Physical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学物理科学学院）；Hefei National Laboratory（合肥国家实验室）；Department of Physics, Boston College（波士顿学院物理系）
The local structure of (Al_0.06V_0.94)_2O_3 in the paramagnetic insulating (PI) and antiferromagnetically ordered insulating (AFI) phase has been investigated using hard and soft x-ray absorption techniques. It is shown that: 1) on a local scale, the symmetry of the vanadium sites in both the PI and the AFI phase is the same; and 2) the vanadium 3d - oxygen 2p hybridization, as gauged by the oxygen 1s absorption edge, is the same for both phases, but distinctly different from the paramagnetic metallic phase of pure V_2O_3. These findings can be understood in the context of a recently proposed …
We report a study of the Mott insulator La$_2$O$_3$Fe$_2$Se$_2$ by means of $^{139}$La nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR). The NQR spectra evidence a single La site in the paramagnetic phase and two inequivalent La sites, La1 and La2, in the antiferromagnetically-ordered phase (Néel temperature $T_{\rm{N}} \simeq 90$ K). These two sites are characterized by different quadrupole couplings, indicative of distinct lattice and/or charge configurations likely segregated in domains. The dependence of the quadrupole coupling for La2 on temperature suggests that the magnetic order parameter drives the…
We use quantum Monte Carlo simulations to study a dimer-diluted $S=1/2$ Heisenberg model on a bilayer square lattice with intralayer interaction $J_{1}$ and interlayer interaction $J_{2}$. Below the classical percolation threshold $p_c$, the system has three phases reachable by tuning the interaction ratio $g=J_{2}/J_{1}$: a N$\acute{e}$el ordered phase, a gapless quantum glass phase, and a gapped quantum paramagnetic phase. We present the ground-state phase diagram in the plane of dilution $p$ and interaction ratio $g$. The quantum glass phase is certified to be of the gapless Mott glass type…
Triangular lattice quasi-two-dimensional Mott insulators based on BEDT-TTF molecule and its analogies present a possibility to produce exotic phases by coupling charge and spin degrees of freedom. In this work we discuss magnetic properties of one of such materials, $κ$-(BEDT-TTF)$_2$Hg(SCN)$_2$Cl, which is found at the border of the phase transition between a Mott insulator into a charge ordered state. Our magnetic susceptibility and cantilever magnetisation measurements demonstrate how the charge degree of freedom defines magnetic properties for few different charge phases observed in this m…
We present a comprehensive study of the spin excitations - as measured by the dynamical spin structure factor $S(q,ω)$ - of the so-called block-magnetic state of low-dimensional orbital-selective Mott insulators. We realize this state via both a multi-orbital Hubbard model and a generalized Kondo-Heisenberg Hamiltonian. Due to various competing energy scales present in the models, the system develops periodic ferromagnetic islands of various shapes and sizes, which are antiferromagnetically coupled. The 2$\times$2 particular case was already found experimentally in the ladder material BaFe$_2$…
Motivated by the recent experimental observation of a Mott insulating state for the layered Iridate Na2IrO3, we discuss possible ordering states of the effective Iridium moments in the presence of strong spin-orbit coupling and a magnetic field. For a field pointing in the [111] direction - perpendicular to the hexagonal lattice formed by the Iridium moments - we find that a combination of Heisenberg and Kitaev exchange interactions gives rise to a rich phase diagram with both symmetry breaking magnetically ordered phases as well as a topologically ordered phase that is stable over a small ran…
We argue that interesting strongly correlated two-dimensional electron systems can be created by modulation doping near a heterojunction between Mott insulators. Because the dopant atoms are remote from the carrier system, the electronic system will be weakly disordered. We argue that the competition between different ordered states can be engineered by choosing appropriate values for the dopant density and the setback distance of the doping layer. In particular larger setback distances favor two-dimensional antiferromagnetism over ferromagnetism. We estimate some key properties of modulation-…
We study the effects of hole doping on one-dimensional Mott insulators with orbital degrees of freedom. We describe the system in terms of a generalized t-J model. At a specific point in parameter space the model becomes integrable in analogy to the one-band supersymmetric t-J model. We use the Bethe ansatz to derive a set of nonlinear integral equations which allow us to study the thermodynamics exactly. Moving away from this special point in parameter space we use the density-matrix renormalization group applied to transfer matrices to study the evolution of various phases of the undoped sys…
We study non-local correlations in a three-orbital Hubbard model defined on an extended one-dimensional chain using determinant quantum Monte Carlo and density matrix renormalization group methods. We focus on a parameter with robust Hund's coupling, which produces an orbital selective Mott phase (OSMP) at intermediate values of the Hubbard U, as well as an orbitally ordered ferromagnetic insulating state at stronger coupling. An examination of the orbital and spin-correlation functions indicates that the orbital ordering occurs before the onset of magnetic correlations in this parameter regim…
We consider the one-band Hubbard model on the square lattice by using variational and Green's 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 pa…
This article contains a theoretical overview of the physical properties of antiferromagnetic Mott insulators in spatial dimensions greater than one. Many such materials have been experimentally studied in the past decade and a half, and we make contact with these studies. The simplest class of Mott insulators have an even number of S=1/2 spins per unit cell, and these can be described with quantitative accuracy by the bond operator method: we discuss their spin gap and magnetically ordered states, and the transitions between them driven by pressure or an applied magnetic field. The case of an …
The degree of electron correlations remains a central issue in the iron-based superconductors. The parent iron pnictides are antiferromagnetic, and their bad-metal behavior has been interpreted in terms of proximity to a Mott transition. We study such a transition in multi-orbital models on modulated lattices containing an ordered pattern of iron vacancies, using a slave-rotor method. We show that the ordered vacancies lead to a band-narrowing, which pushes the system to the Mott insulator side. This effect is proposed to underlie the insulating behavior observed in the parent compounds of the…
We study the interplay of strong electron correlations and intra-triangle spin exchange at two-thirds filling of the single-orbital Hubbard model on the decorated honeycomb lattice using rotationally invariant slave bosons. We find that the spin exchange tunes between a spin-$1$ Mott insulator, a metal, and a spin-$0$ Mott insulator when the exchange is antiferromagnetic. The Mott insulators occur from effective intra-triangle multi-orbital interactions and are adiabatically connected to the ground state of an isolated triangle. An antiferromagnetic spin exchange, as determined by the Goodenou…
A simplified version of the symmetric Kondo lattice model, the Kondo necklace model, is studied by using a representation of impurity and conduction electron spins in terms of local Kondo singlet and triplet operators. Within a mean field theory, a spin gap always appears in the spin triplet excitation spectrum in 1D, leading to a Kondo spin liquid state for any finite values of coupling strength $t/J$ (with $t$ as hopping and $J$ as exchange); in 2D and 3D cubic lattices the spin gaps are found to vanish continuously around $(t/J)_c\approx 0.70$ and $(t/J)_c\approx 0.38$, respectively, where …
We show how a lightly doped Mott insulator has hugely enhanced electronic thermal transport at low temperature. It displays universal behavior independent of the interaction strength when the carriers can be treated as nondegenerate fermions and a nonuniversal "crossover" region where the Lorenz number grows to large values, while still maintaining a large thermoelectric figure-of-merit. The electron dynamics are described by the Falicov-Kimball model which is solved for arbitrary large on-site correlation with a dynamical mean-field theory algorithm on a Bethe lattice. We show how these resul…
Honeycomb iridates are thought to have strongly spin-anisotropic exchange interactions that could lead to an extraordinary state of matter known as the Kitaev quantum spin liquid. The realization of this state requires almost perfectly frustrated interactions between the magnetic Ir$^{4+}$ ions, but small imbalances in energy make other ordered states more favorable. Indeed, the closeness in energy of these ordered states is itself a signature of the intrinsic frustration in the system. In this work, we illustrate that small magnetic fields can be employed to drive the frustrated quantum magne…
We use a three-pulse ultrafast optical spectroscopy to study the relaxation processes in a frustrated Mott insulator Na$_2$IrO$_3$. By being able to independently produce the out-of-equilibrium bound states (excitons) of doublons and holons with the first pulse and suppress the underlying antiferromagnetic order with the second one, we were able to elucidate the relaxation mechanism of quasiparticles in this system. By observing the difference in the exciton dynamics in the magnetically ordered and disordered phases we found that the mass of this quasiparticle is mostly determined by its inter…
