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Doping the holographic Mott insulator

Nature Physics volume 14, pages 1049–1055 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Mott insulators form because of strong electron repulsions and are at the heart of strongly correlated electron physics. Conventionally these are understood as classical ‘traffic jams’ of electrons described by a short-ranged entangled product ground state. Exploiting the holographic duality, which maps the physics of densely entangled matter onto gravitational black hole physics, we show how Mott-like insulators can be constructed departing from entangled non-Fermi liquid metallic states, such as the strange metals found in cuprate superconductors. These ‘entangled Mott insulators’ have traits in common with the ‘classical’ Mott insulators, such as the formation of a Mott gap in the optical conductivity, super-exchange-like interactions and the formation of ‘stripes’ upon doping. They also exhibit new properties: the ordering wavevectors are detached from the number of electrons in the unit cell, and the d.c. resistivity diverges algebraically instead of exponentially as a function of temperature. These results may shed light on the mysterious ordering phenomena observed in underdoped cuprates.

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Fig. 1: Formation of the holographic Mott insulator.
Fig. 2: Holographic renormalization group pattern.
Fig. 3: Doped states.
Fig. 4: Discommensurations.
Fig. 5: The holographic Mott insulator’s d.c. resistivity.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Gauntlett, A. Donos, B. Gouteraux, N. Kaplis, C. Pantelidou and J. Santos for insightful discussions. The research of K.S., A.K. and J.Z. was supported in part by a VICI (K.S.) award of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research/Ministry of Science and Education (NWO/OCW) and by the Foundation for Research into Fundamental Matter (FOM). The work of T.A. is supported by the ERC Advanced Grant GravBHs-692951. He also acknowledges the partial support of the Newton–Picarte grant 20140053. Numerical calculations have been performed on the Maris Cluster of the Lorentz Institute.

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  1. Departament de Física Quàntica i Astrofísica, Institut de Ciències del Cosmos (ICCUB), Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Tomas Andrade

  2. Institute-Lorentz for Theoretical Physics, Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands

    Alexander Krikun, Koenraad Schalm & Jan Zaanen

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  1. Tomas Andrade
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  2. Alexander Krikun
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The numerical work and the analysis was carried out in close collaboration between A.K. and T.A. In the conception of the project K.S. and J.Z. played a key role, and J.Z. helped to guide the research resting on his condensed-matter expertise while K.S. added his field theoretical and holographic duality know-how. The manuscript was written jointly by all authors while A.K. is responsible for the figures.

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Correspondence to Alexander Krikun.

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Andrade, T., Krikun, A., Schalm, K. et al. Doping the holographic Mott insulator. Nature Phys 14, 1049–1055 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-018-0217-6

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