Thermally assisted ordering in Mott insulators

Abstract

Ginzburg-Landau theory describes phase transitions as the competition between energy and entropy: The ordered phase has lower energy, while the disordered phase has larger entropy. When heating the system, ordering is reduced entropically until it vanishes at the critical temperature. This established picture implicitly assumes that the energy difference between ordered and disordered phase does not change with temperature. We show that for the Mott insulator KCuF3 this assumption is strongly violated: thermal expansion energetically stabilizes the orbitally-ordered phase to such and extent that no phase transition is observed. This new mechanism explains not only the absence of a phase transition in KCuF3 but even suggests the possibility of an inverted transition in closed-shell systems, where the ordered phase emerges only at high temperatures.