Electronic charge reconstruction of doped Mott insulators in multilayered nanostructures

Dynamical mean-field theory is employed to calculate the electronic charge reconstruction of multilayered inhomogeneous devices composed of semi-infinite metallic lead layers sandwiching barrier planes of a strongly correlated material (that can be tuned through the metal-insulator Mott transition). The main focus is on barriers that are doped Mott insulators, and how the electronic charge reconstruction can create well-defined Mott insulating regions in a device whose thickness is governed by intrinsic materials properties, and hence may be able to be reproducibly made.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure

Effect of anisotropic hopping on the Bose Hubbard model phase diagram: strong-coupling perturbation theory on a square lattice

There has been a recent resurgence of experimental efforts to quantitatively determine the phase diagram of the Bose Hubbard model by carefully analyzing experiments with ultracold bosonic atoms on an optical lattice. In many realizations of these experiments, the hopping amplitudes are not homogeneous throughout the lattice, but instead, the lattice has an anisotropy where hopping along one direction is not exactly equal to hopping along a perpendicular direction. In this contribution, we examine how an anisotropy in the hopping matrix elements affects the Mott lobes of the Bose Hubbard model. For weak anisotropy, we find the phase diagram is only slightly modified when expressed in terms of the average hopping, while for strong anisotropy, one expects to ultimately see dimensional crossover effects.Comment: (5 pages, 1 figure, RevTeX

Crossover from tunneling to incoherent (bulk) transport in a correlated nanostructure

We calculate the junction resistance for a metal-barrier-metal device with the barrier tuned to lie just on the insulating side of the metal-insulator transition. We find that the crossover from tunneling behavior in thin barriers at low temperature to incoherent transport in thick barriers at higher temperature is governed by a generalized Thouless energy. The crossover temperature can be estimated from the low temperature resistance of the device and the bulk density of states of the barrier.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Applied Physics Letter

Competition between electron-phonon attraction and weak Coulomb repulsion

The Holstein-Hubbard model is examined in the limit of infinite dimensions. Conventional folklore states that charge-density-wave (CDW) order is more strongly affected by Coulomb repulsion than superconducting order because of the pseudopotential effect. We find that both incommensurate CDW and superconducting phases are stabilized by the Coulomb repulsion, but, surprisingly, the commensurate CDW transition temperature is more robust than the superconducting transition temperature. This puzzling feature is resolved by a detailed analysis of perturbation theory.Comment: 13 pages in ReVTex including 3 encapsulated postscript files (embedded in the text). The encapsulated postscript files are compressed and uuencoded after the TeX file

Gap ratio in anharmonic charge-density-wave systems

Many experimental systems exist that possess charge-density-wave order in their ground state. While this order should be able to be described with models similar to those used for superconductivity, nearly all systems have a ratio of the charge-density-wave order parameter to the transition temperature that is too high for conventional theories. Recent work explained how this can happen in harmonic systems, but when the lattice distortion gets large, anharmonic effects must play an increasingly important role. Here we study the gap ratio for anharmonic charge-density wave systems to see whether the low-temperature properties possess universality as was seen previously in the transition temperature and to see whether the explanation for the large gap ratios survives for anharmonic systems as well.Comment: (5 pages, 3 figures, ReVTeX

The anharmonic electron-phonon problem

The anharmonic electron-phonon problem is solved in the infinite-dimensional limit using quantum Monte Carlo simulation. Charge-density-wave order is seen to remain at half filling even though the anharmonicity removes the particle-hole symmetry (and hence the nesting instability) of the model. Superconductivity is strongly favored away from half filling (relative to the charge-density-wave order) but the anharmonicity does not enhance transition temperatures over the maximal values found in the harmonic limit.Comment: 5 pages typeset in ReVTeX. Four encapsulated postscript files include