Abstract
The metal–insulator transition in correlated electron systems, where electron states transform from itinerant to localized, has been one of the central themes of condensed-matter physics for more than half a century. The persistence of this question has been a consequence both of the intricacy of the fundamental issues and the growing recognition of the complexities that arise in real materials, when strong repulsive interactions play the primary role. The initial concept of Mott was based on the relative importance of kinetic hopping (measured by the bandwidth) and onsite repulsion of electrons. Real materials, however, have many further degrees of freedom that, as is recently attracting note, give rise to a rich variety of scenarios for a ‘Mott transition’. Here, we report results for the classic correlated insulator MnO that reproduce a simultaneous moment collapse, volume collapse and metallization transition near the observed pressure, and identify the mechanism as collapse of the magnetic moment due to an increase of crystal-field splitting, rather than to variation in the bandwidth.
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Acknowledgements
J.K. gratefully acknowledges the Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. We acknowledge numerous discussions with D. Vollhardt and A. K. McMahan, and useful interaction with K.-W. Lee during the latter stages of this work. This work was supported by SFB 484 of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (J.K.), by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research under the grants RFFI-06-02-81017, RFFI-07-02-00041 (V.I.A. and A.V.L.) and the Dynasty Foundation (A.V.L.), by DOE grant No. DE-FG02-04ER46111 and by DOE Strategic Science Academic Alliance grant No. DE-FG01-06NA26204. This research was also encouraged and supported by the US Department of Energy’s Computational Materials Science Network (J.K., R.T.S. and W.E.P.).
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J.K. wrote the code and performed the DMFT (QMC) calculations. J.K., R.T.S., W.E.P. and V.I.A. formulated the approach and chose the application to MnO. A.V.L. and V.I.A. calculated the LDA quantities and carried out the Wannier transformation to the local representation. J.K. and W.E.P. wrote the paper.
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Kuneš, J., Lukoyanov, A., Anisimov, V. et al. Collapse of magnetic moment drives the Mott transition in MnO. Nature Mater 7, 198–202 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2115
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2115
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