5.

5 Correlated Insulators 243

5.5.2 Mott Insulators versus

Charge Transfer Insulators
Materials like COO,or La&uO4, are insulators because an electron cor-
relation effect splits the partially filled d-band into a set of either com-
pletely filled, or empty, Hubbard subbands. However, these subbands
are imbedded into a sequence of wider bands which are derived from the
oxygen 2p and the transition metal'' 49 states. The character of the in-
sulator is decided by the lowest excitation energy which is sufficient for
creating a charge carrier: this will appear as the activation energy in the
Arrhenius law for the electrical conductivity. The Mott-Hubbard gap is
not necessarily the smallest of the gaps; it is possible that the relevant
excitation is a charge transfer process between a Hubbard subband and
a wide band.

4 9

> 3d (lower) U
%
holes

T
3 3d (low.)

Figure 5.8: Shifting the relative positions of the Hubbard subbands and the 2p
band gives rise to different kinds of systems. In a Mott insulator (MI), the smallest
gap is between two Hubbard subbands. In a charge transfer insulator (CTI), the
lowest-energy process is the excitation of an electron from the 2p band to the upper
Hubbard subband. In both cases, the activation energy Aac is marked. In the right-
hand panel, the overlapping of the 21, band with the upper Hubbard subband gives
a metal (2pM) in which the dominant charge carriers are 2p holes. The horizontal
lines indicate the F'ermi level (FF.

Fig. 5.8 illustrates several of the possibilities, by inserting the Hub-

bard subbands into the midst of the wider bands. We should remember
'We do not bother to distinguish the noble metal Cu from transition metals; Cuat
is like the transition metal ions.