Exact integration of the high energy scale in doped Mott insulators

We expand on our earlier work [R. G. Leigh et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 46404 (2007)] in which we constructed the exact low energy theory of a doped Mott insulator by explicitly integrating (rather than projecting) out the degrees of freedom far away from the chemical potential. The exact low energy theory contains degrees of freedom that cannot be obtained from projective schemes. In particular, a charge $\pm 2e$ bosonic field that is not made out of elemental excitations emerges at low energies. Such a field accounts for dynamical spectral weight transfer across the Mott gap. At half-filling, we show that two such excitations emerge which play a crucial role in preserving the Luttinger surface along which the single-particle Green’s function vanishes. In addition, the interactions with the bosonic fields defeat the artificial local SU(2) symmetry that is present in the Heisenberg model. We also apply this method to the Anderson-U impurity and show that in addition to the Kondo interaction, bosonic degrees of freedom appear as well. Finally, we show that as a result of the bosonic degree of freedom, the electron at low energies is in a linear superposition of two excitations—one arising from the standard projection into the low energy sector and the other from the binding of a hole and the boson.

Figure 1

(Color online) (a) Extended Hilbert space for a single site. (b) Hopping processes between neighboring sites included in the Lagrangian. Double occupation has been replaced by $D$ occupation.