Infinite single-particle bandwidth of a Mott–Hubbard insulator

2016

The conventional viewpoint of the strongly correlated electron metal-insulator transition is that a single band splits into two upper and lower Hubbard bands at the transition. Much work has investigated whether this transition is continuous or discontinuous. Here we focus on another aspect and ask the question of whether there are additional upper and lower Hubbard bands, which stretch all the way out to infinity — leading to an infinite single-particle bandwidth (or spectral range) for the Mott insulator. While we are not able to provide a rigorous proof of this result, we use exact diagonalization studies on small clusters to motivate the existence of these additional bands, and we discu…