Two-dimensional disordered Mott metal-insulator transition

Abstract

We studied several aspects of the Mott metal-insulator transition in the disordered case. The model on which we based our analysis is the disordered Hubbard model, which is the simplest model capable of capturing the Mott metal-insulator transition. We investigated this model through the Statistical Dynamical Mean-Field Theory (statDMFT). This theory is a natural extension of the Dynamical Mean-Field Theory (DMFT), which has been used with relative success in the last several years with the purpose of describing the Mott transition in the clean case. As is the case for the latter theory, the statDMFT incorporates the electronic correlation effects only in their local manifestations. Disorder, on the other hand, is treated in such a way as to incorporate Anderson localization effects. With this technique, we analyzed the disordered two-dimensional Mott transition, using Quantum Monte Carlo to solve the associated single-impurity problems. We found spinodal lines at which the metal and insulator cease to be meta-stable. We also studied spatial fluctuations of local quantities, such as the self-energy and the local Green's function, and showed the appearance of metallic regions within the insulator and vice-versa. We carried out an analysis of finite-size effects and showed that, in agreement with the theorems of Imry and Ma, the first-order transition is smeared in the thermodynamic limit. We analyzed transport properties by means of a mapping to a random classical resistor network and calculated both the average current and its distribution across the metal-insulator transition.