Fate of spinons at the Mott point

Abstract

Gapless spin liquids have recently been observed in several frustrated Mott insulators, with elementary spin excitations - "spinons" - reminiscent of degenerate Fermi systems. However, their precise role at the Mott point, where charge fluctuations begin to proliferate, remains controversial and ill-understood. Here we present the simplest theoretical framework that treats the dynamics of emergent spin and charge excitations on the same footing, providing a new physical picture of the Mott metal-insulator transition at half filing. We identify a generic orthogonality mechanism leading to strong damping of spinons, arising as soon as the Mott gap closes. Our results indicates that spinons should not play a significant role within the high-temperature quantum critical regime above the Mott point - in striking agreement with all available experiments.

arXiv comment5 pages, 4 figures. Supplemental material expanded in V3

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Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Low-Temperature Dielectric Anomalies at the Mott Insulator-Metal Transition
• Electrodynamics of quantum spin liquids
• Low-Energy Excitations in Quantum Spin-Liquids Identified by Optical Spectroscopy
• Quantum critical local spin dynamics near the Mott metal-insulator transition in infinite dimensions