Relevance of long-range screening in Mott transition examined via a hydrogen lattice

Abstract: The Mott transition, a metal-insulator transition due to strong electronic interaction, is observed in many materials without an accompanying change of system symmetry. An important open question in Mott's proposal is the role of long-range screening, whose drastic change across the quantum phase transition may self-consistently make the transition more abrupt, toward a first-order one. Here we investigate this effect in a model system of hydrogen atoms in a cubic lattice, using charge self-consistent dynamical mean-field theory that incorporates approximately the long-range interaction within the density functional treatment. We found that the system is well within the charge-transfer regime and that the charge-transfer gap intimately related to the Mott transition closes smoothly instead. This indicates that within this approximation, the long-range screening does not play an essential role in this prototypical example. We explain this finding by demonstrating analytically that the obtained insulating phase in this typical case is driven by short-range physics of large energy scale, and the transition is controlled by the charge-transfer gap closing, both insensitive to long-range screening.