Nature of ground states in one-dimensional electron-phonon Hubbard models at half-filling

TL;DR

This paper uses renormalization group analysis to explore the phase diagram of one-dimensional electron-phonon Hubbard models at half-filling, revealing complex phase boundaries and intermediate states consistent with quantum Monte Carlo results.

Contribution

It provides a detailed theoretical analysis of phase transitions and intermediate phases in 1D electron-phonon Hubbard models, aligning with and extending previous numerical findings.

Findings

Identification of an intermediate phase between charge-density-wave and Mott antiferromagnet.

Discovery of a Luttinger liquid line and a narrow bond-order-wave region.

Power law relation between electron-phonon coupling and Coulomb interaction at phase boundary.

Abstract

The renormalization group technique is applied to one-dimensional electron-phonon Hubbard models at half-filling and zero temperature. For the Holstein-Hubbard model, the results of one-loop calculations are congruent with the phase diagram obtained by quantum Monte Carlo simulations in the $(U,g_{\rm ph})$ plane for the phonon-mediated interaction $g_{\rm ph}$ and the Coulomb interaction $U$. The incursion of an intermediate phase between a fully gapped charge-density-wave state and a Mott antiferromagnet is supported along with the growth of its size with the molecular phonon frequency $\omega_0$. We find additional phases enfolding the base boundary of the intermediate phase. A Luttinger liquid line is found below some critical $ U^*\approx g^*_{\rm ph}$, followed at larger $U\sim g_{\rm ph}$ by a narrow region of bond-order-wave ordering which is either charge or spin gapped depending on $U$. For the Peierls-Hubbard model, the region of the $(U,g_{\rm ph})$ plane with a fully gapped Peierls-bond-order-wave state shows a growing domination over the Mott gapped antiferromagnet as the Debye frequency $\omega_D$ decreases. A power law dependence $g_{\rm ph} \sim U^{2\eta}$ is found to map out the boundary between the two phases, whose exponent is in good agreement with the existing quantum Monte Carlo simulations performed when a finite nearest-neighbor repulsion term $V$ is added to the Hubbard interaction.