We develop a stochastic description of the topological properties in an interacting Chern insulator. We confirm the Mott transition's first-order nature in the interacting Haldane model on the honeycomb geometry, from a mean-field variational approach, supported by density matrix renormalization group results and Ginzburg-Landau arguments. From the Bloch sphere, we make predictions for circular dichroism of light related to the quantum Hall conductivity on the lattice and in the presence of interactions. This analysis shows that the topological number can be measured from the light response at the Dirac points. Electron-electron interactions can also produce a substantial number of particle-hole pairs above the band gap, which leads us to propose a "stochastic Chern number" as an interacting measure of the topology. The stochastic Chern number can describe disordered situations with a fluctuating staggered potential and we build an analogy between interaction-induced particle-hole pairs and temperature effects. Our stochastic approach is physically intuitive, easy to implement and leads the way to further studies of interaction effects.
Successive quantum transitions in an intermediate regime are shown to exist between the superfluid and Mott insulating states for interacting bosonic atoms in one dimension with a trapping potential. These transitions, which are caused by the interplay of the trapping potential with the competition between the kinetic energy and the interaction, reveal novel many-body effects as reflected by low-lying excitation behavior, unconventional long-range correlations and an even-odd alternating squeezing process of superfluid bosons into the Mott insulating state. These features, most likely being ge…
We investigate the ground state and quantum dynamics of an interacting bosonic chain with the nonreciprocal hopping. In sharp contrast to its Hermitian counterpart, the ground state can support Mott insulators in systems with noninteger filling due to the competition between nonreciprocal hopping and the on-site interaction. For the quantum dynamics, conservation laws for non-Hermitian systems manifest a stark difference from their Hermitian counterpart. In particular, for any Hermitian operator that commutes with the Hamiltonian operator, its expectation value is guaranteed to be nonconserved…
The underlying Fermi surface is a key concept for strongly-interacting electron models and has been introduced to generalize the usual notion of the Fermi surface to generic (superconducting or insulating) systems. By using improved correlated wave functions that contain backflow and Jastrow terms, we examine the two-dimensional $t{-}t^\prime$ Hubbard model and find a non-trivial renormalization of the topology of the underlying Fermi surface close to the Mott insulator. Moreover, we observe a sharp crossover region, which arises from the metal-insulator transition, from a weakly interacting m…
We study transport properties of the half-filled two-dimensional (2D) Hubbard model with spatially varying interactions, where a pattern of interacting and non-interacting sites is formed. We use Determinantal Quantum Monte Carlo method to calculate the double occupation, effective hopping and Drude weight. These data point to two phase transitions, driven by fermionic correlations. The first is the expected metal to a Mott insulating state. The second one, is an exotic transition from a Mott insulating state to a highly anisotropic metal, that takes place at large values of the fermion-fermio…
We study the electronic spectral properties in two examples of strongly interacting systems: a Mott-Hubbard insulator with additional electron-boson interactions, and a polaronic semiconductor. An approximate unified framework is developed for the high energy part of the spectrum, in which the electrons move in a random field determined by the interplay between magnetic and bosonic fluctuations. When the boson under consideration is a lattice vibration, the resulting isotope effect on the spectral properties is similar in both cases, being strongly temperature and energy dependent, in qualitat…
We study various Mott insulating phases of interacting spin-3/2 fermionic ultracold atoms in two-dimensional square optical lattices at half filling. Using a generalized one-band Hubbard model with hidden SO(5) symmetry, we identify two distinct symmetry breaking phases: the degenerate antiferromagnetic spin-dipole/spin-octupole ordering and spin-quadrupole ordering, depending on the sign of the spin-dependent interaction. These two competing orders exhibit very different symmetry properties, low energy excitations and topological characterizations. Near the SU(4) symmetric point, a quantum cr…
We study the competition between a random potential and a commensurate potential on interacting fermionic and bosonic systems using a variety of methods. We focus on one dimensional interacting fermionic systems but higher dimensional bosonic and fermionic extensions, as well as classical equivalents are also discussed. Our methods which include bosonization, replica variational method, functional renormalization group (RG) and perturbation around the atomic limit, go beyond conventional perturbative expansions around the Luttinger liquid in one dimension. All these methods agree on the predic…
Recent theory and experiment have revealed that strong spin-orbit coupling can have dramatic qualitative effects on the band structure of weakly interacting solids. Indeed, it leads to a distinct phase of matter, the topological band insulator. In this paper, we consider the combined effects of spin-orbit coupling and strong electron correlation, and show that the former has both quantitative and qualitative effects upon the correlation-driven Mott transition. As a specific example we take Ir-based pyrochlores, where the subsystem of Ir 5d electrons is known to undergo a Mott transition. At we…
Characterizing Mott Insulators in the Interacting One-Body Picture
Université de Sherbrooke（舍布鲁克大学）；Donostia International Physics Center（圣塞巴斯蒂安国际物理中心）；University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)（巴斯克大学）；Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research, IFW Dresden（德累斯顿IFW莱布尼茨固体与材料研究所）；Regroupement Québécois sur les Matériaux de Pointe (RQMP)（魁北克尖端材料研究联合体）
We study the effects of electronic correlations on fragile topology using dynamical mean-field theory. Fragile topological insulators (FTIs) offer obstruction to the formation of exponentially localized Wannier functions, but they can be trivialized by adding certain trivial degrees of freedom. For the same reason, FTIs do not host symmetry-protected flow of edge states between bulk bands in cylindrical boundary conditions but are expected to have a spectral flow between the fragile bands and other bands under certain twisted boundary conditions. We here analyze commonly observed effects of st…
We review recent progress in our theoretical understanding of strongly correlated fermion systems in the presence of disorder. Results were obtained by the application of a powerful nonperturbative approach, the Dynamical Mean-Field Theory (DMFT), to interacting disordered lattice fermions. In particular, we demonstrate that DMFT combined with geometric averaging over disorder can capture Anderson localization and Mott insulating phases on the level of one-particle correlation functions. Results are presented for the ground-state phase diagram of the Anderson-Hubbard model at half filling, bot…
We consider transport through a one-dimensional conductor subject to an external periodic potential and connected to non-interacting leads (a "Mott quantum wire"). For the case of a strong periodic potential, the conductance is shown to jump from zero, for the chemical potential lying within the Mott-Hubbard gap, to the non-interacting value of 2e^2/h, as soon as the chemical potential crosses the gap edge. This behavior is strikingly different from that of an optical conductivity, which varies continuously with the carrier concentration. For the case of a weak potential, the perturbative corr…
Effects of randomness on interacting fermionic systems in one dimension are investigated by quantum Monte-Carlo techniques. At first, interacting spinless fermions are studied whose ground state shows charge ordering. Quantum phase transition due to randomness is observed associated with the collapse of the charge ordering. We also treat random Hubbard model focusing on the Mott gap. Although the randomness closes the Mott gap and low-lying states are created, which is observed in the charge compressibility, no (quasi-) Fermi surface singularity is formed. It implies localized nature of the lo…
The description of interactions in strongly-correlated topological phases of matter remains a challenge. Here, we develop a stochastic functional approach for interacting topological insulators including both charge and spin channels. We find that the Mott transition of the Kane-Mele-Hubbard model may be described by the variational principle with one equation. We present different views of this equation from the electron Green's function, the free-energy and the Hellmann-Feynman theorem. The band gap remains finite at the transition and the Mott phase is characterized by antiferromagnetism in…
Harmonically trapped lattice bosons with strong repulsive interactions exhibit a superfluid-Mott-insulator heterostructure in the form of a "wedding cake". We discuss the mesoscopic aspects of such a system within a one-dimensional scattering matrix approach and calculate the scattering properties of quasi-particles at a superfluid-Mott-insulator interface as an elementary building block to describe transport phenomena across such a boundary. We apply the formalism to determine the heat conductivity through a Mott layer, a quantity relevant to describe thermalization processes in the optical l…
We calculate the non-equilibrium electronic transport properties of a one-dimensional interacting chain at half filling, coupled to non-interacting leads. The interacting chain is initially in a Mott insulator state that is driven out of equilibrium by applying a strong bias voltage between the leads. For bias voltages above a certain threshold we observe the breakdown of the Mott insulator state and the establishment of a steady-state electronic current through the system. Based on extensive time-dependent density matrix renormalization group simulations, we show that this steady-state curren…
In order to study the tunneling of electrons through an interacting, 1D, dimerized molecule connected to leads, we consider the persistent current in a ring embedding this molecule. We find numerically that, for spinless fermions, a molecule with a gap mostly due to interactions, i.e. a Mott-Hubbard gap, gives rise to a larger persistent current than a molecule with the same gap, but due only to the dimerization. In both cases, the tunneling current decreases exponentially with the size of the molecule, but more slowly in the interacting case. Implications for molecular electronic are briefly …
It is well established that for non-interacting electrons, increasing disorder drives a metal into a gapless localized Anderson insulator. While in three dimensions a threshold in disorder must be crossed for the transition, in two dimensions and lower, the smallest amount of disorder destabilizes the metal. The nature of the metal-insulator transition in an interacting system remains unresolved. Here we explore the effect of disorder on a strongly correlated Mott insulator without changing the carrier concentration. Angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) measurements on copper inte…
An array of superconducting islands with semiconducting nanowires in the right regime provides a macroscopic implementation of Kitaev's toy model for Majorana wires. We show that a capacitive coupling between adjacent islands leads to an effective interaction between the Majorana modes. We demonstrate that even though strong repulsive interaction eventually drive the system into a Mott insulating state the competition between the (trivial) band-insulator and the (trivial) Mott insulator leads to an interjacent topological insulating state for arbitrary strong interactions.
Via the hierarchy of correlations, we study the Mott insulator phase of the Fermi-Hubbard model in the limit of strong interactions and derive a quantum Boltzmann equation describing its relaxation dynamics. In stark contrast to the weakly interacting case, we find that the scattering cross sections strongly depend on the momenta of the colliding quasi-particles and holes. Therefore, the relaxation towards equilibrium crucially depends on the spectrum of excitations. For example, for particle-hole excitations directly at the minimum of the (direct) Mott gap, the scattering cross sections vanis…
We investigate the interacting Dirac fermions on honeycomb lattice by cluster dynamical mean-field theory (CDMFT) combined with continuous time quantum Monte Carlo simulation (CTQMC). A novel scenario for the semimetal-Mott insulator transition of the interacting Dirac fermions is found beyond the previous DMFT studies. We demonstrate that the non-local spatial correlations play a vital role in the Mott transition on the honeycomb lattice. We also elaborate the experimental protocol to observe this phase transition by the ultracold atoms on optical honeycomb lattice.
In order to identify possible experimental signatures of the superfluid to Mott-insulator quantum phase transition we calculate the charge structure factor $S(k,ω)$ for the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model using the dynamical density-matrix renormalisation group (DDMRG) technique. Particularly we analyse the behaviour of $S(k, ω)$ by varying---at zero temperature---the Coulomb interaction strength within the first Mott lobe. For strong interactions, in the Mott-insulator phase, we demonstrate that the DDMRG results are well reproduced by a strong-coupling expansion, just as the quasi-particl…
It is widely recognised that the effect of doping into a Mott insulator is complicated and unpredictable, as can be seen by examining the Hall coefficient in high $T_{\rm c}$ cuprates. The doping effect, including the electron-hole doping asymmetry, may be more straightforward in doped organic Mott insulators owing to their simple electronic structures. Here we investigate the doping asymmetry of an organic Mott insulator by carrying out electric-double-layer transistor measurements and using cluster perturbation theory. The calculations predict that strongly anisotropic suppression of the spe…
In his preprint, arXiv:0711.0952v1, Behnam Farid argues that the Luttinger theorem is valid not only for a metal but also for a Mott insulator if the chemical potential is calculated by taking the limit of vanishing temperature at fixed particle density. In contrast, we have found in our recent paper (Eur. Phys. J. B 59, 495 (2007) or arXiv:cond-mat/0602656) on the basis of a controlled strong coupling expansion that the Luttinger theorem is violated in this limit for a particle-hole asymmetric two-band Mott insulator. In an extensive discussion of our result Farid argues that an arbitrarily w…
We present a computationally efficient method to obtain the spectral function of bulk systems in the framework of steady-state density functional theory (i-DFT) using an idealized Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) setup. We calculate the current through the STM tip and then extract the spectral function from the finite-bias differential conductance. The fictitious non-interacting system of i-DFT features an exchange-correlation (xc) contribution to the bias which guarantees the same current as in the true interacting system. Exact properties of the xc bias are established using Fermi-liquid …
A large repulsion between particles in a quantum system can lead to their localization, as it happens for the electrons in Mott insulating materials. This paradigm has recently branched out into a new quantum state, the orbital-selective Mott insulator, where electrons in some orbitals are predicted to localize, while others remain itinerant. We provide a direct experimental realization of this phenomenon, that we extend to a more general flavour-selective localization. By using an atom-based quantum simulator, we engineer SU(3) Fermi-Hubbard models breaking their symmetry via a tunable coupli…
We study the conductivity, density of states, and magnetic correlations of a two dimensional, two band fermion Hubbard model using determinant Quantum Monte Carlo (DQMC) simulations. We show that an orbitally selective Mott transition (OSMT) occurs in which the more weakly interacting band can be metallic despite complete localization of the strongly interacting band. The DQMC method allows us to test the validity of the use of a momentum independent self-energy which has been a central approximation in previous OSMT studies. In addition, we show that long range antiferromagnetic order (LRAFO)…
We present the theory of thermoelectric transport in metals with long-lived quasiparticles, carefully addressing the interplay of electron-electron scattering as well as electron-impurity scattering, but neglecting electron-phonon scattering. In Fermi liquids with a large Fermi surface and weak electron-impurity scattering, we provide universal and simple formulas for the behavior of the thermoelectric conductivities across the ballistic-to-hydrodynamic crossover. In this regime, the electrical conductivity is relatively unchanged by hydrodynamic effects. In contrast, the thermal conductivity …
We study numerically the voltage-induced breakdown of a Mott insulating phase in a system of charged classical particles with long-range interactions. At half-filling on a square lattice this system exhibits Mott localization in the form of a checkerboard pattern. We find universal scaling behavior of the current at the dynamic Mott insulator-metal transition and calculate scaling exponents corresponding to the transition. Our results are in agreement, up to a difference in universality class, with recent experimental evidence of dynamic Mott transition in a system of interacting superconducti…
In the field of interacting electron systems the Mott metal-to-insulator (MI) transition represents one of the pivotal issues. The role played by lattice degrees of freedom for the Mott MI transition and the Mott criticality in a variety of materials are current topics under debate. In this context, molecular conductors of the $κ$-(BEDT-TTF)$_2$X type constitute a class of materials for unraveling several aspects of the Mott physics. In this review, we present a synopsis of literature results with focus on recent expansivity measurements probing the Mott MI transition in this class of material…
We have used the Stochastic Series Expansion quantum Monte Carlo method to study interacting hard-core bosons on the square lattice, with pair-hopping processes supplementing the standard single-particle hopping. Such pair hopping arises in effective models for frustrated quantum magnets. Our goal is to investigate the effects of the pair hopping process on the commonly observed superfluid, insulating (Mott), and super-solid ground-state phases in the standard hard-core boson model with various interaction terms. The model is specifically motivated by the observation of finite dispersion of 2-…
In a solid material strong interactions between the electrons can lead to surprising properties. A prime example is the Mott insulator, where the suppression of conductivity is a result of interactions and not the consequence of a filled Bloch band. The proximity to the Mott insulating phase in fermionic systems is the origin for many intriguing phenomena in condensed matter physics, most notably high-temperature superconductivity. Therefore it is highly desirable to use the novel experimental tools developed in atomic physics to access this regime. Indeed, the Hubbard model, which encompasses…
The pairing of interacting fermions leading to superfluidity has two limiting regimes: the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) scheme for weakly interacting degenerate fermions and the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of bosonic pairs of strongly interacting fermions. While the superconductivity that emerges in most metallic systems is the BCS-like electron pairing, strongly correlated electrons with poor Fermi liquidity can condense into the unconventional BEC-like pairs. Quantum spin liquids harbor extraordinary spin correlation free from order and the superconductivity that possibly emerges by …
By performing exact quantum Monte Carlo simulations of a model of interacting Dirac Fermions with staggered potential, we reveal a novel intermediate phase where the electronic correlations drive a band insulator metallic, and at a larger interaction, drive the metal to Mott insulator. We also show that the Mott insulating phase is antiferromagnetic. A complete phase diagram is achieved by studying the phase transitions at large staggered potential and interaction strengths, which shows that the intermediate state is robust and occupies a large part of the phase diagram and that it should be m…
Electron correlation and topology are two central threads of modern condensed matter physics. Semiconductor moiré materials provide a highly tunable platform for studies of electron correlation. Correlation-driven phenomena, including the Mott insulator, generalized Wigner crystals, stripe phases and continuous Mott transition, have been demonstrated. However, nontrivial band topology has remained elusive. Here we report the observation of a quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) effect in AB-stacked MoTe2/WSe2 moiré heterobilayers. Unlike in the AA-stacked structures, an out-of-plane electric field con…
We investigate properties of a topological Mott insulator in one dimension by examining the bulk topological invariant and the entanglement spectrum of a correlated electron model. We clarify how gapless edge states in a non-interacting topological band insulator evolve into spinon edge states in a topological Mott insulator. Furthermore, we propose a topological Mott transition, which is a new type of topological phase transition and never observed in free fermion systems. This unconventional transition occurs in spin liquid phases in the Mott insulator and is accompanied by zeros of the sing…
We describe the two-dimensional Mott transition in a Hubbard-like model with nearest neighbors interactions based on a recent solution to the Zamolodchikov tetrahedron equation, which extends the notion of integrability to two-dimensional lattice systems. At the Mott transition, we find that the system is in a d-density wave or staggered flux phase that can be described by a double Chern Simons effective theory with symmetry \su2 \otimes \su2. The Mott transition is of topological nature, characterized by the emergence of vortices in antiferromagnetic arrays interacting strongly with the elect…
It is shown that the Anderson-Mott metal-insulator transition of paramagnetic, interacting disordered electrons in an external magnetic field is in the same universality class as the transition from a ferromagnetic metal to a ferromagnetic insulator discussed recently. As a consequence, large corrections to scaling exist in the magnetic-field universality class, which have been neglected in previous theoretical descriptions. The nature and consequences of these corrections to scaling are discussed.
The interacting Kane-Mele model with a long-range hopping is studied using analytical method. The original Kane-Mele model is defined on a honeycomb lattice. In the work, we introduce a four-lattice-constant range hopping and the on-site Hubbard interaction into the model and keep its lattice structure unchanged. From the single-particle energy spectrum, we obtain the critical strength of the long-range hopping $t_L$ at which the topological transition occurs in the non-interacting limit of the model and our results show that it is independent of the spin-orbit coupling. After introducing the …
We study the ground-state topology and quasiparticle properties in bosonic Mott insulators with two- dimensional spin-orbit couplings in cold atomic optical lattices. We show that the many-body Chern and spin-Chern number can be expressed as an integral of the quasihole Berry curvatures over the Brillouin zone. Using a strong-coupling perturbation theory, for an experimentally feasible spin-orbit coupling, we compute the Berry curvature and the spin Chern number and find that these quantities can be generated purely by interactions. We also compute the quasiparticle dispersions, spectral weigh…
We study the half-filled Hubbard model on the triangular lattice with spin-dependent Kitaev-like hopping. Using the variational cluster approach, we identify five phases: a metallic phase, a non-coplanar chiral magnetic order, a $120^\circ$ magnetic order, a nonmagnetic insulator (NMI), and an interacting Chern insulator (CI) with a nonzero Chern number. The transition from CI to NMI is characterized by the change of the charge gap from an indirect band gap to a direct Mott gap. Based on the slave-rotor mean-field theory, the NMI phase is further suggested to be a gapless Mott insulator with a…
Presented in this thesis are a set of projects which lie at the intersection between strong correlations and topological phases of matter. The first of these projects is a treatment of an infinite dimensional generalization of the SSH model with local Coulomb interactions which is solved exactly using DMFT-NRG. Observed in the solution is power-law augmentation of the non-interacting density of states, as well as a Mott transition. This calculation represents an exact solution to an interacting topological insulator in the strongly correlated regime at zero temperature. The second set of proje…
We show that a wide class of unconventional quantum criticality emerges when orbital currents cause quantum phase transitions from zero-gap semiconductors such as Dirac fermions to topological insulator (TI) or Chern insulator (CI). Changes in Fermi surface topology concomitant with (SU(2) or time reversal) symmetry breakings generate quantum critical lines (QCL) even beyond the quantum critical point. This QCL running at temperature $T=0$ separates two distinct topological phases. This is in contrast to the simple termination of the finite temperature critical line at the quantum critical poi…
In this work we consider a system of spinless fermions with nearest and next-to-nearest neighbor repulsive Hubbard interactions on a honeycomb lattice, and propose and analyze a realistic scheme for analog quantum simulation of this model with cold atoms in a two-dimensional hexagonal optical lattice. To this end, we first derive the zero-temperature phase diagram of the interacting model within a mean-field theory treatment. We show that besides a semi-metallic and a charge-density-wave ordered phase, the system exhibits a quantum anomalous Hall phase, which is generated dynamically, i.e. pur…
The magnetic field of complete spin polarization is calculated in a disorderless single-valley strongly-interacting 2D electron system. In the metallic region above the Wigner-Mott transition, non-equilibrium spin states are predicted, which should give rise to hysteresis in the magnetization.
