Metal-insulator transitions at surfaces

Abstract

Various types of metal-insulator transitions are discussed to find conditions for which an ideal surface of a bulk insulator is metallic. It is argued that for the correlation-driven Mott metal-insulator transition the surface phase diagram should be expected to have the same topology as the phase diagram for magnetic order at surfaces: The corresponding linearized mean-field descriptions, a simplified dynamical mean-field theory of the Hubbard model and the Weiss mean-field theory for the Ising model, are found to be formally equivalent. A new kind of surface state appears in the low-energy part of the one-particle excitation spectrum as a precursor effect of the Mott transition.