Temperature and Dimensionality Dependences of Optical Absorption Spectra in Mott Insulators

We investigate the temperature dependence of optical absorption spectra of one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) Mott insulators by using an effective model in the strong-coupling limit of a half-filed Hubbard model. In the numerically exact diagonalization calculations on finite-size clusters, we find that in 1D the energy position of the absorption edge is almost independent of temperature, while in 2D the edge position shifts to lower energy with increasing temperature. The different temperature dependence between 1D and 2D is attributed to the difference of the coupling of the charge and spin degrees of freedom. The implications of the results on experiments are discussed in terms of the dimensionality dependence.