Finite-Temperature Charge Dynamics and the Melting of the Mott Insulator

The Mott insulator is the quintessential strongly correlated electronic state. We obtain complete insight into the physics of the two-dimensional Mott insulator by extending the slave-fermion (holon-doublon) description to finite temperatures. We first benchmark its predictions against state-of-the-art quantum Monte Carlo simulations, demonstrating quantitative agreement. Qualitatively, the short-ranged spin fluctuations both induce holon-doublon bound states and renormalize the charge sector to form the Hubbard bands. The Mott gap is understood as the charge gap renormalized downwards by these spin fluctuations. As temperature increases, the Mott gap closes before the charge gap, causing a pseudogap regime to appear naturally during the melting of the Mott insulator.