Theoretical prediction of fragile Mott insulators on plaquette Hubbard lattices

Abstract

© 2015 American Physical Society. Employing extensive cellular dynamical mean-field theory calculations with an exact diagonalization impurity solver, we investigate the ground-state phase diagrams and nonmagnetic metal-insulator transitions of the half-filled Hubbard model on two plaquette (the 1/5 depleted and checkerboard) square lattices. We identify three different insulators in the phase diagrams: dimer insulator, antiferromagnetic insulator, and plaquette insulator. We also demonstrate that the plaquette insulator is a novel fragile Mott insulator (FMI) which features a nontrivial one-dimensional irreducible representation of the C4v crystalline point group and cannot be adiabatically connected to any band insulator with time-reversal symmetry. Furthermore, we study the nonmagnetic quantum phase transitions from the metal to the FMI and find that this Mott metal-insulator transition is characterized by the splitting of the noninteracting bands due to interaction effects.