Electronic modes induced by spin and charge perturbations in Mott and Kondo insulators

Abstract

Electronic band structures usually remain unaffected by doping via a chemical-potential shift or by increasing the temperature in conventional band insulators. In contrast, it has been shown that those of Mott and Kondo insulators can be altered by doping or by increasing the temperature: electronic modes are induced within the band gap, exhibiting momentum-shifted magnetic dispersion relations from the band edges. Here, this study demonstrates that the underlying mechanism of the remarkable strong-correlation effects can be generalized to the emergence of electronic modes caused by various spin and charge perturbations, including magnetization of spin-gapped Mott and Kondo insulators. These emergent modes can alter the band structure if a macroscopic number of spins or charges are excited by the perturbations at a given moment. The origins and dispersion relations of these emergent modes, particularly why and how the dispersion relations depend on the momentum and energy of the perturbations, are elucidated by investigating the selection rules and using the Bethe ansatz and the effective theory for weak inter-unit-cell hopping. The validity and generality of the theoretical results across different models and spatial dimensions are verified by numerical calculations for the one- and two-dimensional Hubbard models, periodic Anderson models, Kondo lattice models, and ladder and bilayer Hubbard models. This study provides crucial insights into why and how spin and charge perturbations can alter the band structure in strongly correlated insulators, thereby paving the way for band-structure engineering in strong-correlation electronics, which enables previously unexplored functionalities by exploiting the unconventional characteristics revealed in this paper.