4.

2 Mott Damition 155

energy
atom t itinerant localized

€33 : atomic energy

metal-insulator transition
€33 - at33

Figure 4.3: The most naive scenario for the Mott transition: The energy of the
uncorrelated Fermi sea exceeds the energy of independent Na atoms if U3a/t3a > 4a.
At the critical value, the nature of the many-electron ground state changes from
itinerant to localized (the ground state follows the bold line).

predict a phase transition: for (U33/t33) < (U33/t33)cr, JFS) is accepted

as ground state, while for (U33/t33) > (U33/t33)cr, the ground state is
an array of neutral atoms. Thus we have a transition from a delocalized
metallic state to a fully localized insulatingstate (illustrated in Fig. 4.3).
It goes without saying that this utterly naive scenario of a Mott transi-
tion will have to be replaced by a more sophisticated argument. How-
ever, the picture remains basically the same: the Mott transition is an
interaction-induced, collective localization of all the electrons.
Remark: Remember that we had a very similar story with the transition
from the Heitler-London picture to the molecular orbital picture for the hy-
drogen molecule (Sec. 2.5.3). We are, of course, aware that the nature of the
ground state of H2 changes continuously between the two limits, and the sharp
transition shown in Fig. 2.4 is spurious. In contrast, we assert that the sharp
transition seen in Fig. 4.3 is physically genuine; it is only its characterization
which is unacceptably simpleminded. The reason for this difference is that
we need a macroscopically large system (the so-called thermodynamic limit;
see Sec. 7.2.1) to have a sharp phase transition. Mean-field-like arguments