Temperature-driven change in band structure reflecting spin-charge separation of Mott and Kondo insulators

TL;DR

This paper investigates how temperature affects the band structure of Mott and Kondo insulators, revealing that spin excited states cause significant spectral changes and can induce insulator-metal transitions without phase changes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel interpretation of temperature-induced band structure changes based on spin excited states, challenging conventional static spin correlation views.

Findings

Spin excited states emerge in spectral functions at nonzero temperature.

Temperature can induce insulator-metal crossover via spin excitations.

Spectral weights appear within the band gap at finite temperatures.

Abstract

The electronic band structure can change with temperature in Mott and Kondo insulators, even without a phase transition. Here, to clarify the underlying mechanism, the spectral function at nonzero temperature is studied. By considering selection rules, the spin excited states of Mott and Kondo insulators, whose excitation energies are lower than the charge gap, are shown to emerge in the electronic spectral function at nonzero temperature, exhibiting momentum-shifted magnetic dispersion relations from the band edges, as in the case of the doping-driven Mott transition at zero temperature. Based on this characteristic, we interpret the numerical results for temperature-driven change in band structure in the one- and two-dimensional and ladder Hubbard models and one-dimensional periodic Anderson model at half filling obtained using cluster perturbation theory with the low-temperature Lanczos method. This characteristic also explains why the band structures can change with temperature even in the energy regime far higher than the temperature and why spectral weights emerge in the energy regime within the band gap, where excitation energies are lower than the lowest electronic excitation energy from the ground state. Furthermore, if the band width of the spin excitation is comparable to the band gap, the emergent electronic modes can cross the Fermi level and gain spectral weight as the temperature increases, which leads to an insulator-metal crossover. These features are primarily caused by the spin excited states that are transparent in electronic measurements at zero temperature, in contrast to the conventional view where thermal effects on electron-added and removed states and static spin correlations are considered to mainly affect the band structure. This innovative perspective provides a different understanding from the conventional view on electronic states at nonzero temperatures.