Tuesday, May 4, 2021

A rich phase diagram for a Hubbard model on the decorated honeycomb lattice

 An important scientific idea is that simple rules can produce complex behaviour. In condensed matter theory, model Hamiltonians with just a few parameters can have rich phase diagrams with many competing ground states. My colleagues and I just completed a paper that is one more example of this.

Spin-0 Mott insulator to metal to spin-1 Mott insulator transition in the single-orbital Hubbard model on the decorated honeycomb lattice  H. L. Nourse, Ross H. McKenzie, B. J. Powell 

We study the interplay of strong electron correlations and intra-triangle spin exchange at two-thirds filling of the single-orbital Hubbard model on the decorated honeycomb lattice using rotationally invariant slave bosons (RISB). We find that the spin exchange tunes between a spin-1 Mott insulator, a metal, and a spin-0 Mott insulator when the exchange is antiferromagnetic. The Mott insulators occur from effective intra-triangle multi-orbital interactions and are adiabatically connected to the ground state of an isolated triangle. An antiferromagnetic spin exchange, as determined by the Goodenough-Kanamori rules, may occur in coordination polymers from kinetic exchange via the ligands. We characterize the magnetism in the regime where spin-triplets dominate. For small U a spin-1 Slater insulator occurs with antiferromagnetic order between triangles. Magnetism in the spin-1 Mott insulator is described by a spin-1 Heisenberg model on a honeycomb lattice, whose ground state is Néel ordered.

Comments are welcome.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Why is the state of universities such an emotional issue for me?

It all about values! Universities have changed dramatically over the course of my lifetime. Australian universities are receiving increasing...