Mott transition and electronic excitation of the Gutzwiller wavefunction

TL;DR

This paper investigates the Mott transition within a Fermi-liquid-like ground state using the Gutzwiller wavefunction, revealing that the transition involves charge freezing and spectral weight loss rather than effective mass divergence.

Contribution

It provides a new perspective on the Mott transition, emphasizing charge localization over traditional effective mass divergence, through numerical analysis of electron-addition excitations in various lattice models.

Findings

Electronic modes lose spectral weight approaching the Mott transition.

The magnetic dispersion relation is shifted by the Fermi momentum in the small-doping limit.

The Mott transition involves charge freezing with active spin degrees of freedom.

Abstract

The Mott transition is usually considered as resulting from the divergence of the effective mass of the quasiparticle in the Fermi-liquid theory; the dispersion relation around the Fermi level is considered to become flat towards the Mott transition. Here, to clarify the characterization of the Mott transition under the assumption of a Fermi-liquid-like ground state, the electron-addition excitation from the Gutzwiller wavefunction in the $t$-$J$ model is investigated on a chain, ladder, square lattice, and bilayer square lattice in the single-mode approximation using a Monte Carlo method. The numerical results demonstrate that an electronic mode that is continuously deformed from a non-interacting band at zero electron density loses its spectral weight and gradually disappears towards the Mott transition. It exhibits essentially the magnetic dispersion relation shifted by the Fermi momentum in the small-doping limit as indicated by recent studies for the Hubbard and $t$-$J$ models, even if the ground state is assumed to be a Fermi-liquid-like state exhibiting gradual disappearance of the quasiparticle weight. This implies that, rather than as the divergence of the effective mass or disappearance of the carrier density that is expected in conventional single-particle pictures, the Mott transition can be better understood as freezing of the charge degrees of freedom while the spin degrees of freedom remain active, even if the ground state is like a Fermi liquid.