Hartree-Fock study of the Anderson metal-insulator transition in the presence of Coulomb interaction: Two types of mobility edges and their multifractal scaling exponents

• Published in: Physical review. B 2018-04, Vol.97 (15), Article 155105
• Main Authors: Lee, Hyun-Jung, Kim, Ki-Seok
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Anderson localization; Computer simulation; Critical point; Density of states; Eigenvectors; Energy; Exponents; Fractal analysis; Fractal transforms; Insulators; Metal-insulator transition; Order parameters; Scaling
• ISSN: 2469-9950; 2469-9969
• DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.97.155105

We investigate the role of Coulomb interaction in the multifractality of Anderson metal-insulator transition, where the Coulomb interaction is treated within the Hartree-Fock approximation, but disorder effects are taken into account exactly. An innovative technical aspect in our simulation is to utilize the Ewald-sum technique, which allows us to introduce the long-range nature of the Coulomb interaction into Hartree-Fock self-consistent equations of order parameters more accurately. This numerical simulation reproduces the Altshuler-Aronov correction in a metallic state and the Efros-Shklovskii pseudogap in an insulating phase, where the density of states ρ(ω) is evaluated in three dimensions. Approaching the quantum critical point of a metal-insulator transition from either the metallic or insulting phase, we find that the density of states is given by ρ(ω)∼|ω|1/2, which determines one critical exponent of the McMillan-Shklovskii scaling theory. Our main result is to evaluate the eigenfunction multifractal scaling exponent αq, given by the Legendre transformation of the fractal dimension τq, which characterizes the scaling behavior of the inverse participation ratio with respect to the system size L. Our multifractal analysis leads us to identify two kinds of mobility edges, one of which occurs near the Fermi energy and the other of which appears at a high energy, where the density of states at the Fermi energy shows the Coulomb-gap feature. We observe that the multifractal exponent at the high-energy mobility edge remains to be almost identical to that of the Anderson localization transition in the absence of Coulomb interactions. On the other hand, we find that the multifractal exponent near the Fermi energy is more enhanced than that at the high-energy mobility edge, suspected to result from interaction effects. However, both the multifractal exponents do not change even if the strength of the Coulomb interaction varies. We also show that the multifractality singular spectrum can be classified into two categories, confirming the appearance of two types of mobility edges.