Nature of the Insulating Ground State of the Two-Dimensional Sn Atom Lattice on SiC(0001).

Semiconductor surfaces with narrow surface bands provide unique playgrounds to search for Mott-insulating state. Recently, a combined experimental and theoretical study of the two-dimensional (2D) Sn atom lattice on a wide-gap SiC(0001) substrate proposed a Mott-type insulator driven by strong on-site Coulomb repulsion U within a single-band Hubbard model. However, our systematic density-functional theory (DFT) study with local, semilocal, and hybrid exchange-correlation functionals shows that the Sn dangling-bond state largely hybridizes with the substrate Si 3p and C 2p states to split into three surface bands due to the crystal field.

DFT and TB study of the geometry of hydrogen adsorbed on graphynes.

Using density-functional calculations (DFT) and a tight-binding model, we investigate the origin of distinct favorable geometries which depend on the type of graphyne used. The change in the H geometry is described in terms of the tuning of the hopping between sp(2)-bonded C atoms and sp-bonded C atoms hybridized with the H atoms. We find that the different preferred geometry for each type of graphyne is associated with the electronic effects due to different symmetries rather than a steric effect minimizing the repulsive interaction between the H atoms.

Theoretical prediction of a strongly correlated Dirac metal.

Recently, the most intensely studied objects in the electronic theory of solids have been strongly correlated systems and graphene. However, the fact that the Dirac bands in graphene are made up of sp(2) electrons, which are subject to neither strong Hubbard repulsion U nor strong Hund's rule coupling J, creates certain limitations in terms of novel, interaction-induced physics that could be derived from Dirac points. Here we propose GaCu3(OH)6Cl2 (Ga-substituted herbertsmithite) as a correlated Dirac-Kagome metal combining Dirac electrons, strong interactions and frustrated magnetic interactions.

Absence of metallicity in K-doped picene: importance of electronic correlations.

Potassium-doped picene (K(x)picene) has recently been reported to be a superconductor at x=3 with critical temperatures up to 18 K. Here we study the electronic structure of K-doped picene films by photoelectron spectroscopy and ab initio density functional theory combined with dynamical mean-field theory (DFT+DMFT). Experimentally we observe that, except for spurious spectral weight due to the lack of a homogeneous chemical potential at low K concentrations (x≈1), the spectra always display a finite energy gap.

Dynamical cluster approximation study of the anisotropic two-orbital Hubbard model.

We investigate the properties of a two-orbital Hubbard model with unequal bandwidths on the square lattice in the framework of the dynamical cluster approximation (DCA) combined with a continuous-time quantum Monte Carlo algorithm. We explore the effect of short-range spatial fluctuations on the nature of the metal-insulator transition and the possible occurrence of an orbital-selective Mott transition (OSMT) as a function of cluster size N{c}. We observe that for N{c}=2 no OSMT is present, instead a band insulator state for both orbitals is stabilized at low temperatures due to the appearance of an artificial local ordered state.