Semiconductor of spinons: from Ising band insulator to orthogonal band insulator

Tohid Farajollahpour; S. A. Jafari

doi:10.1088/1361-648x/aa9ae1

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 1601.02108

Semiconductor of spinons: from Ising band insulator to orthogonal band insulator

Tohid Farajollahpour·S. A. Jafari

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Within the ionic Hubbard model, electron correlations transmute the single-particle gap of a band insulator into a Mott gap in the strong correlation limit. However understanding the nature of possible phases in between these two extreme insulating phases remains an outstanding challenge. We find two strongly correlated insulating phases in between the above extremes: (i) The insulating phase just before the Mott phase can be viewed as gapping a non-Fermi liquid state of spinons through staggered ionic potential. The quasi-particles of underlying spinons are orthogonal to physical electrons and hence they do not couple to photoemission probes, giving rise to "ARPES-dark" state due to which the ARPES gap will be larger than optical and thermal gap. (ii) The correlated insulating phase just after the normal band insulator corresponds to the ordered phase of slave Ising spins (Ising insulator) where charge configuration is controlled by an underlying Ising variable which indirectly couples to external magnetic field and hence gives rise to additional temperature and field dependence in semiconducting properties. In the absence of tunability for the Hubbard $U$, such a temperature and field dependence can be conveniently employed to achieve further control on the transport properties of Ising-based semiconductors. The rare earth monochalcogenide semiconductors where the magneto-resistance is anomalously large can be a candidate system for the ordered phase of Ising variable where pairs of charge bosons are condensed in the background. Combining present results with our previous dynamical mean field theory study, we argue that the present picture holds if the ionic potential is strong enough to survive the downward renormalization of the ionic potential caused by Hubbard $U$.

Explore related subjects

cond-mat.str-el cond-mat.mtrl-sci physics.chem-ph

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Tohid Farajollahpour, S. A. Jafari. 2016-07-29. Semiconductor of spinons: from Ising band insulator to orthogonal band insulator. https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-648x%2Faa9ae1

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Competing Interlayer Loop Currents and Superconductivity in the Bilayer $t$-$J_\perp$-$V$ Model

The recent discovery of high-$T_c$ superconductivity in pressurized and thin-film bilayer nickelates, featuring a strong interlayer exchange coupling, and their potential similarities with cuprate superconductors, has made this a very active topic in condensed matter physics. In the present paper we study the strongly correlated one-orbital ($d_{x^2-y^2}$) bilayer $t$-$J_\perp$-$V$ model for nickelates, where $V$ denotes the Coulomb interactions, using a controlled large-$N$ expansion at and beyond the mean-field level. Focusing on the out-of-plane spin exchange interaction ($J_\perp$), we find that it triggers both out-of-plane $s$-wave superconductivity and an out-of-plane bond-order phase ($z$-BOP) instability. The $z$-BOP gives rise to a complex $z$-axis hopping dominated by its imaginary component, which drives out-of-plane currents and induces in-plane ones, spontaneously forming on the vertical plaquettes a loop-current state that breaks time-reversal symmetry. Competition between this loop-current phase and superconductivity yields a dome-shaped superconducting region, with optimal superconductivity occurring near the $z$-BOP quantum critical point. The resulting phase diagram features a pure loop-current region, a low-doping coexistence phase, a pure superconducting state at higher doping, and a correlated metallic state.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2026

Optically induced metallic state with persistent monoclinic symmetry in NdNiO$_3$

Understanding whether electronic and structural order remain coupled under nonequilibrium conditions is a central challenge in correlated materials. Here, we simultaneously track metallicity and symmetry across the photoinduced insulator-to-metal transition in NdNiO$_3$ using time-resolved optical reflectivity and symmetry-sensitive second-harmonic generation. We find that metallic reflectivity emerges at significantly lower excitation fluence than restoration of the orthorhombic high-temperature symmetry. As a result, optical excitation stabilizes a metastable state that combines the reflectivity of the metallic phase with the monoclinic symmetry of the insulating phase, revealing an optically induced monoclinic metal. Only at substantially higher fluences does the symmetry fully recover to that of the high-temperature phase. These results demonstrate a nonequilibrium decoupling of metallicity and structural symmetry and establish simultaneous multiprobe spectroscopy as a powerful approach for identifying emergent phases in correlated materials.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2026

Instabilities in self-consistent diagrammatic approaches and how to cure them

While self-consistent diagrammatic approaches are widely used to compute the physical properties of correlated quantum materials, their applicability may get severely hindered precisely in the parameter regions, where the most exciting physics is observed. One of the major issues, referred to as "misleading convergence", is the tendency of iterative schemes to converge to unphysical fixed points for intermediate-to-strong electronic interactions, regardless of numerical accuracy of the computation. Here, we explicitly verify that the origin of this problem in several established self-consistent many-electron approaches, defined in the general diagrammatic framework of the boson-exchange formalism, resides exclusively in the stability condition of the respective iteration schemes, and not in an intrinsic breakdown of their self-consistent diagrammatic description. This insight enables a simple and general remedy, as recently proposed in Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 016502 (2026): The redefinition of the iterative procedure, by inverting the unstable eigendirections of the Jacobian associated to the fixed point of the self-consistent algorithm. We illustrate the successful outcome of this procedure by means of systematic calculations performed on testbed, exactly solvable, models. Our results demonstrate that the physical fixed point of the diagrammatic schemes we considered can be stabilized, de facto, across the entire parameter range, including the most challenging nonperturbative/strong-coupling regimes.

cond-mat.str-el↗