Condensed-Matter Physics & Materials Science Seminar

Dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) studies frequently observe a fine structure in the local spectral function of the SU(2) Fermi-Hubbard model (i.e., one-band Hubbard model) at half filling: In the metallic phase close to the Mott transition, subpeaks emerge at the inner edges of the Hubbard bands. Here we demonstrate that these subpeaks originate from the low-energy effective interaction of doublon-holon pairs, by investigating how the correlation functions of doublon and holon operators contribute to the subpeaks [1, 2]. We use the numerical renormalization group (NRG) as a DMFT impurity solver to obtain the correlation functions on the real-frequency axis with improved spectral resolution [3]. A mean-field analysis of the low-energy effective Hamiltonian [2] provides results consistent with the numerical result. The subpeaks are associated with a distinctive dispersion that is different from those for quasiparticles and the Hubbard bands. Also, the subpeaks become more pronounced in the SU(N) Hubbard models for larger number N of particle flavors, due to the increased degeneracy of doublon-holon pair excitations. Hence we expect that the sub-peaks can be observed in the photoemission spectroscopy experiments of multi-band materials or in the ultracold atom simulation of the SU(N) Hubbard models. [1] S.-S. B. Lee, J. von Delft, and A. Weichselbaum, Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 236402 (2017). [2] S.-S. B. Lee, J. von Delft, and A. Weichselbaum, Phys. Rev. B 96, 245106 (2017). [3] S.-S. B. Lee and A. Weichselbaum, Phys. Rev. B 94, 235127 (2016).