Optical absorption of strongly correlated half-filled Mott-Hubbard chains

In this, the last of three articles on the optical absorption of electrons in a half-filled Peierls-distorted chain, we address the dimerized extended Hubbard model in the limit of a large on-site interaction U. When the Hubbard interaction is large compared with both the bandwidth W and the nearest-neighbour interaction V, the charge dynamics are properly described by the Harris-Lange model. This model can be exactly mapped onto a model of free spinless fermions in parallel (Hubbard) bands of width W which are eventually Peierls split. To determine the coherent absorption features at low temperatures, we design and employ the ‘no-recoil approximation’ in which we assume that the momentum transfer to the spin degrees of freedom can only be Δqs = 0 or Δqs = π/a during an optical excitation. We present explicit analytical results for the optical absorption in the presence of a lattice dimerization δ and a nearest-neighbour interaction V for the Néel and dimer state. We find that the coherent part of the optical absorption for and the spin dimerization of the ground state.