Magnon heat transport in a two-dimensional Mott insulator

Abstract

Whether or not anomalies in the thermal conductivity in insulating cuprates can be attributed to antiferromagnetic order and magnons in a 2D Mott insulator remains an intriguing open question. To shed light on this issue, we investigate the thermal conductivity $\kappa$ and its relationship with the specific heat $c_v$ in the half-filled 2D single-band Hubbard model, using the numerically exact determinant quantum Monte Carlo algorithm and maximum entropy analytic continuation. At low temperatures where the charge degrees of freedom are gapped-out and $c_v$ exhibits a clear magnon peak, we observe that thermal conductivity $\kappa$ also tends to form a peak at similar temperatures. Reducing temperature further produces a sharp upturn in $\kappa$, associated with an increasing mean-free path. We identify this as the high-temperature side of the anomalous peak in insulating cuprates, where the mean-free path eventually is cut-off by other scattering effects, including phonons, disorder, and physical size. Different scattering effects in our model are identified and analyzed in the thermal diffusivity.

6 pages, 4 figures. Supplementary Material: 11 pages, 11 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Theory of Intertwined Orders in High Temperature Superconductors
• Numerical Linked-Cluster Approach to Quantum Lattice Models
• A Short Introduction to Numerical Linked-Cluster Expansions
• Comment on "Anomalous Thermal Conductivity of Frustrated Heisenberg Spin Chains and Ladders"
• Effect of particle statistics in strongly correlated two-dimensional Hubbard models
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• Quantitative assessment of the universal thermopower in the Hubbard model
• Twisting the Hubbard model into the Momentum-Mixing Hatsugai-Kohmoto Model
• Topological transverse spin transport in a canted antiferromagnet/heavy metal heterostructure
• Intrinsic Thermal Hall Effect in Mott Insulators
• Probing the pseudogap and beyond: Examining single-particle properties of the hole- and electron-doped Hubbard model