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| Author(s): |
Eric de Castro e Andrade
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | Campinas, SP. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Física Gleb Wataghin |
| Defense date: | 2010-08-19 |
| Examining board members: |
Eduardo Miranda;
Guillermo Gerardo Cabrera Oyarzún;
Alex Antonelli;
Raimundo Rocha dos Santos;
Marcelo Leite Lyra
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| Advisor: | Eduardo Miranda |
| Abstract | |
Disordered strongly correlated electronic systems have two basic routes towards localization underlying the destruction of the metallic state: the Mott route (driven by electron-electron interaction) and the Anderson route (driven by disorder). In this thesis, we study how these two mechanisms compete in the metallic phase, and also how they change the critical behavior of the system, within a generalization to the disordered case of the Brinkman-Rice scenario for the Mott transition. We investigate the effects of weak to moderate disorder on the Mott metal-insulator transition at T = 0 in two dimensions. For sufficiently weak disorder, the transition retains the Mott character, as signaled by the vanishing of the local quasiparticle weights Zi and strong disorder screening at criticality. In contrast to the behavior in d = 8, here the local spatial fluctuations of quasiparticle parameters are strongly enhanced in the critical regime, with a distribution function P(Z) ~ Z a-1 and a --> 0 at the transition. This behavior indicates the robust emergence of an electronic Griffiths phase preceding the MIT, in a fashion surprisingly reminiscent of the " Infinite Randomness Fixed Point" scenario for disordered quantum magnets. As an immediate consequence of these new features introduced by disorder, we have that the electronic states close to the Fermi energy become more spatially homogeneous in the critical region, whereas the higher energy states show the opposite behavior: they display enhanced spatial inhomogeneity precisely in the close vicinity to the Mott transition. We suggest that such energy-resolved disorder screening is a generic property of disordered Mott systems. We also study how well-known effects of the long-ranged Friedel oscillations are affected by strong electronic correlations. We first show that their range and amplitude are signifficantly suppressed in strongly renormalized Fermi liquids. We then investigate the interplay of elastic and inelastic scattering in the presence of these oscillations. In the singular case of two-dimensional systems, we show how the anomalous ballistic scattering rate is conned to a very restricted temperature range even for moderate correlations. In general, our analytical results indicate that a prominent role of Friedel oscillations is relegated to weakly interacting systems. Finally, we discuss the effects of correlations on the Anderson insulator in one dimension. We construct the scaling function ß(g) and we show that the crossover scaling g*, which marks the transition between the ohmic and the localized regimes of the conductance, is renormalized by the interactions. As a consequence, we show that, although truly extend states do not emerge, the ohmic regime covers now a considerably larger region in the parameter space (AU) | |