On Gossamer Metals and Insulating Behavior

Abstract

We extend the Gossamer technique recently proposed to describe superconducting ground states to metallic ground states. The gossamer metal in a single band model will describe a metallic phase that becomes arbitrarily hard to differentiate from an insulator as one turns the Coulomb correlations up. We were motivated by the phase diagram of V$_2$O$_3$ and f-electron systems which have phase diagrams in which a line of first order metal-insulator transition ends at a critical point above which the two phases are indistinguishable. This means that one can go continuously from the metal to the ``insulator'', suggesting that they might be the same phase.