2002/04/05 by M. Potthoff
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.str-el
published as Adv. Solid State. Phys. 42, 121 (2002) · 11 pages, 4 eps figures included, Adv. Solid State Phys. (in press)
arxiv created 2002/04/05 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
Various types of metal-insulator transitions are discussed to find conditions for which an ideal surface of a bulk insulator is metallic. It is argued that for the correlation-driven Mott metal-insulator transition the surface phase diagram should be expected to have the same topology as the phase diagram for magnetic order at surfaces: The corresponding linearized mean-field descriptions, a simplified dynamical mean-field theory of the Hubbard model and the Weiss mean-field theory for the Ising model, are found to be formally equivalent. A new kind of surface state appears in the low-energy part of the one-particle excitation spectrum as a precursor effect of the Mott transition.