A continuous Mott transition between a metal and a quantum spin liquid

Abstract

More than half a century after first being proposed by Sir Nevill Mott, the deceptively simple question of whether the interaction-driven electronic metal-insulator transition may be continuous remains enigmatic. Recent experiments on two-dimensional materials suggest that when the insulator is a quantum spin liquid, lack of magnetic long-range order on the insulating side may cause the transition to be continuous, or only very weakly first order. Motivated by this, we study a half-filled extended Hubbard model on a triangular lattice strip geometry. We argue, through use of large-scale numerical simulations and analytical bosonization, that this model harbors a continuous (Kosterlitz-Thouless-like) quantum phase transition between a metal and a gapless spin liquid characterized by a spinon Fermi surface, i.e., a "spinon metal." These results may provide a rare insight into the development of Mott criticality in strongly interacting two-dimensional materials and represent one of the first numerical demonstrations of a Mott insulating quantum spin liquid phase in a genuinely electronic microscopic model.

18 pages, 9 figures

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Cited by in corpus (26)

• Continuous Mott transition in semiconductor moiré superlattices
• Chiral spin liquid phase of the triangular lattice Hubbard model: a density matrix renormalization group study
• Ground state phase diagram of the triangular lattice Hubbard model by density matrix renormalization group method
• Bridging Hubbard Model Physics and Quantum Hall Physics in Trilayer Graphene/h-BN moiré superlattice
• Doped Mott Insulators in the Triangular Lattice Hubbard Model
• Metal-insulator transition in transition metal dichalcogenide heterobilayer moiré superlattices
• Phase diagram of the anisotropic triangular lattice Hubbard model
• Quasi-continuous transition from a Fermi liquid to a spin liquid
• Hubbard ladders at small $U$ revisited
• A DMRG Study of Superconductivity in the Triangular Lattice Hubbard Model
• Gapless spin liquid and pair density wave of the Hubbard model on three-leg triangular cylinders
• Quantum Phases of Transition Metal Dichalcogenide Moiré Systems
• Cyclotron resonance inside the Mott gap: a fingerprint of emergent neutral fermions
• Griffiths-like phase close to the Mott transition
• Dimensional decoupling at continuous quantum critical Mott transitions
• Probing Critical Surfaces in Momentum Space Using Real-Space Entanglement Entropy: Bose versus Fermi
• Magnetic phases of the anisotropic triangular lattice Hubbard model
• Thermodynamic Properties of the Mott Insulator-Metal Transition in a Triangular Lattice System Without Magnetic Order
• Metal to Wigner-Mott insulator transition in two-leg ladders
• Thermal algebraic-decay charge liquid driven by competing short-range Coulomb repulsion
• Finite-Temperature Signatures of Spin Liquids in Frustrated Hubbard Model
• Signatures of gapless fermionic spinons on a strip of the kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet
• Continuous Wigner-Mott transition at $\nu =1/5$
• Mott Gap Softening Coinciding with Spin Correlations Collapse in a-RuCl3
• Quantum Spin Liquids in Weak Mott Insulators with a Spin-Orbit Coupling
• Ferromagnetism and doublon localization in a Wannier-Hubbard chain