Soft Hubbard gaps in disordered itinerant models with short-range interaction

Abstract

We study the Anderson-Hubbard model in the Hartree-Fock approximation and the exact diagonalization under the coexistence of short-range interaction and diagonal disorder. We show that there exist unconventional soft gaps, where the single-particle (SP) density of states (DOS) $A$ follows a scaling in energy $E$ as $A(E)\propto \exp[-(-\gamma\log |E-E_F|)^d]$ irrespective of electron filling and long-range order. Here, $d$ is the spatial dimension, $E_F$ the Fermi energy and $\gamma$ a non-universal constant. We propose a multi-valley energy landscape as their origin. Possible experiments to verify the present theory are proposed.