Real-space Mott-Anderson electron localization with long-range interactions

Abstract

Real materials always contain, to some extent, randomness in the form of defects or irregularities. It is known since the seminal work of Anderson that randomness can drive a metallic phase to an insulating one, and the mechanism responsible for this transition is intrinsically different from the one of the interaction-induced transitions discovered by Mott. Lattice Hamiltonians, with their conceptual and computational advantages, permitted to investigate broadly the interplay of both mechanisms. However, a clear understanding of the differences (or not) with their real-space counterparts is lacking, especially in the presence of long-range Coulomb interactions. This work aims at shedding light on this challenging question by investigating a real-space one-dimensional model of interacting electrons in the presence of a disordered potential. The transition between delocalized and localized phases is characterized using two different indicators, namely, the single-particle occupation entropy and the position-space information entropy. In addition, the performance of density functional approximations to reproduce the exact ground-state densities of this many-body localization model are gauged.