Metal-Mott insulator interfaces

TL;DR

This paper models the interface between metallic and Mott insulating phases, using a Landau free energy approach to unify different types of Mott transitions and analyze electronic spectra in a slab geometry.

Contribution

It introduces a novel modeling framework for metal-Mott insulator interfaces, unifying bandwidth and filling controlled transitions via an Ising order parameter.

Findings

Effective Landau free energy constructed for the interface.

Identification of a natural Ising order parameter.

Analysis of electronic spectra across the phase diagram.

Abstract

Motivated by the direct observation of electronic phase separation in first-order Mott transitions, we model the interface between the thermodynamically coexisting metal and Mott insulator. We show how to model the required slab geometry and extract the electronic spectra. We construct an effective Landau free energy and compute the variation of its parameters across the phase diagram. Finally, using a linear mixture of the density and double-occupancy, we identify a natural Ising order parameter which unifies the treatment of the bandwidth and filling controlled Mott transitions.