2012/05/23 by Zheng Zhu, Hong-Chen Jiang, Zhu, Zheng +7
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) #cond-mat.str-el
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1205.5277
Main text has 12 pages and 5 figures; supplemental information has 4 pages and 5 figures
arxiv created 2012/05/23 · arxiv updated 2012/05/25
A long-standing issue in the physics of strongly correlated electronic systems is whether the motion of a single hole in quantum antiferromagnets can be understood in terms of the quasiparticle picture. Very recently, investigations of this issue have been within the experimental reach. Here we perform a large-scale density matrix renormalization group study, and provide the first unambiguous numerical evidence showing that in ladder systems, a single hole doped in the Mott antiferromagnet does not behave as a quasiparticle. Specifically, the injected hole is found to be always localized as long as the leg number is larger than one, with a vanishing quasiparticle weight and a localization length monotonically decreasing with the leg number. In addition, the single hole self-localization is insensitive to the parity (even-odd) of the leg number. Our findings may advance conceptual developments in different fields of condensed matter physics. First of all, the intriguing self-localization phenomenon is of pure strong correlation origin free of extrinsic disorders. Therefore, it is in sharp contrast to the well-known Anderson localization and recently found many-body localization, where extrinsic disordered potentials play crucial roles. Second, they confirm the analytical predictions of the so-called phase string theory, suggesting that the phase string effect lies in the core of the physics of doped Mott antiferromagnets.