Hidden Charge Orders in Low-Dimensional Mott Insulators

Abstract

The opening of a charge gap driven by interaction is a fingerprint of the transition to a Mott insulating phase. In strongly correlated low-dimensional quantum systems, it can be associated to the ordering of hidden non-local operators. For Fermionic 1D models, in the presence of spin–charge separation and short-ranged interaction, a bosonization analysis proves that such operators are the parity and/or string charge operators. In fact, a finite fractional non-local parity charge order is also capable of characterizing some two-dimensional Mott insulators, in both the Fermionic and the bosonic cases. When string charge order takes place in 1D, degenerate edge modes with fractional charge appear, peculiar of a topological insulator. In this article, we review the above framework, and we test it to investigate through density-matrix-renormalization-group (DMRG) numerical analysis the robustness of both hidden orders at half-filling in the 1D Fermionic Hubbard model extended with long range density-density interaction. The preliminary results obtained at finite size including several neighbors in the case of dipolar, screened and unscreened repulsive Coulomb interactions, confirm the phase diagram of the standard extended Hubbard model. Besides the trivial Mott phase, the bond ordered and charge density wave insulating phases are also not destroyed by longer ranged interaction, and still manifest hidden non-local orders.