Disorder-induced localisation in the Mott-Hubbard model

TL;DR

This paper investigates how disorder affects quasiparticle localization in the Mott insulator phase of the Fermi-Hubbard model, revealing different localization behaviors for charge and spin disorder through spectral and spatial analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a comparative study of charge and spin disorder effects on quasiparticle localization in the Mott insulator, using the hierarchy of correlations and strong-coupling perturbation theory.

Findings

Charge disorder causes energetic and spatial separation of localized and delocalized states.

Spin disorder leads to localization across the entire quasiparticle band.

Results from hierarchy of correlations agree with strong-coupling perturbation theory.

Abstract

For the Fermi-Hubbard model in the Mott insulator phase, we employ the hierarchy of correlations to study how doublon and holon quasi-particle excitations are affected by adding disorder to the system. We study two types of disorder: charge disorder, in the form of on-site potential randomness; and spin disorder, in the form of a fixed, randomly generated background spin arrangement. By analysing the quasi-particle eigen-spectra and quantifying the degree to which the corresponding eigen-states localise, we find both an energetic and spatial separation between localised and delocalised states in the charge disorder. In contrast, the spin disorder results in localised states throughout the quasi-particle bands. Finally, we repeat our calculations using strong-coupling perturbation theory, and compare the results obtained from both methods.