Density-matrix embedding theory study of the one-dimensional Hubbard-Holstein model

Abstract: We present a density-matrix embedding theory (DMET) study of the one-dimensional Hubbard-Holstein model, which is paradigmatic for the interplay of electron-electron and electron-phonon interactions. Analyzing the single-particle excitation gap, we find a direct Peierls insulator to Mott insulator phase transition in the adiabatic regime of slow phonons in contrast to a rather large intervening metallic phase in the anti-adiabatic regime of fast phonons. We benchmark the DMET results for both on-site energies and excitation gaps against density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) results and find excellent agreement of the resulting phase boundaries. We also compare the fully quantum treatment of phonons against the standard Born-Oppenheimer (BO) approximation. The BO approximation gives qualitatively similar results to DMET in the adiabatic regime, but fails entirely in the anti-adiabatic regime, where BO predicts a sharp direct transition from Mott to Peierls insulator, whereas DMET correctly shows a large intervening metallic phase. This highlights the importance of quantum fluctuations in the phononic degrees of freedom for metallicity in the one-dimensional Hubbard-Holstein model.