Microscopic description of insulator-metal transition in high-pressure oxygen.

Unusual metallic states involving breakdown of the standard Fermi-liquid picture of long-lived quasiparticles in well-defined band states emerge at low temperatures near correlation-driven Mott transitions. Prominent examples are ill-understood metallic states in d- and f-band compounds near Mott-like transitions. Finding of superconductivity in solid O on the border of an insulator-metal transition at high pressures close to 96 GPa is thus truly remarkable.

Family of exactly solvable models with an ultimate quantum paramagnetic ground state.

We present a family of two-dimensional frustrated quantum magnets solely based on pure nearest-neighbor Heisenberg interactions which can be solved quasiexactly. All lattices are constructed in terms of frustrated quantum cages containing a chiral degree of freedom protected by frustration. The ground states of these models are dubbed ultimate quantum paramagnets and exhibit an extensive entropy at zero temperature.

From frustrated insulators to correlated anisotropic metals: charge-ordering and quantum criticality in coupled chain systems.

By following the ideas of Emery and Noguera, a recent study revealed the dynamics of the charge sector of a one-dimensional quarter-filled electronic system with extended Hubbard interactions to be that of an effective pseudospin transverse-field Ising model (TFIM) in the strong-coupling limit. With the twin motivations of studying the co-existing charge and spin order found in strongly correlated chain systems and the effects of interchain couplings, we investigate the phase diagram of coupled effective (TFIM) systems. A bosonization and renormalization group (RG) analysis for a two-leg TFIM ladder yields a rich phase diagram showing Wigner/Peierls charge order and Néel/dimer spin order.