5.

5 Correlated Insulators 235

outcome is that at low temperatures, the system is an ordered insulating

antiferromagnet. Neglecting magnetic anisotropy, the low-energy spin
excitations are gapless antiferromagnetic spin waves. Mott insulators
have a large charge gap, and no spin gap12. This behaviour should
be contrasted with that of conventional band insulators like diamond:
those are non-magnetic, and have both a charge gap and a spin gap
which can be taken as equal.
There is an interesting little subclass represented by Y2BaNi05. It
is a Mott insulator which has a spin gap, for very special reasons. The
Ni++ ions carry S = 1 spins, and the system is magnetically quasi-one-
dimensional, with essentially non-communicating Ni-chains. It turns
out that the singlet ground state of the isotropic S = 1 Heisenberg
chain is characterized by an exponential fall-off of spin correlations, and
a spin gap. The charge gap is large (of the order of NleV), while the
spin gap is s m a l l (of the order of the Heisenberg coupling, i.e., -0.OleV).
More about this on pp. 303-305.
The second major class of correlated insulators is that of mixed
valent and Kondo insulators. They have a spin gap as well as a charge
gap, and both tend to be small but they need not be equal. We discuss
them briefly in Ch. 11.

5.5.1 Mott Transitions in Transition Metal Oxides

The vanadium sesquioxide V203 has long been renowned as the model
system for a variety of Mott phenomena [293].However, it turned out
that it is far from being a straighforward realization of the single-band
Hubbard model. We will try to describe those features first, which can
12Thespin gap is the energy of the lowest excitation which changes the spin charac-
ter of the system. Spin waves do that, and (neglecting anisotropy and dipoldipole
interactions) their dispersion starts from zero.
Since there are systems which have a charge gap but no spin gap, the reader may
ask whether the reverse case is also possible. Purely formally, we can readily say

-
yes. The strong-coupling negative-U Hubbard model at fractional fillings should be
a liquid of doubly occupied sites, i.e., a conductor with a spin gap U. For more
general interactions, we may envisage a (normal) quantum liquid of mobile singlet
bonds which extend over several lattice sites. We do not wish to join the dispute as
to whether such model results are pertinent to the behaviour of the strange normal
metallic phase of certain high-Tc superconductors.