Mott transition, Widom line, and pseudogap in the half-filled triangular lattice Hubbard model

The Mott transition is observed experimentally in materials that are magnetically frustrated so that long-range order does not hide the Mott transition at finite temperature. The Hubbard model on the triangular lattice at half filling is a paradigmatic model to study the interplay of interactions and frustration on the normal-state phase diagram. We use the dynamical cluster approximation with continuous-time auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo to solve this model for 1-, 4-, 6-, 12-, and 16-site clusters with detailed analysis performed for the 6-site cluster. We show that (a) for every cluster there is an inflection point in the double occupancy as a function of interaction, defining a Widom line that extends above the critical point of the first-order Mott transition; (b) the presence of this line and the cluster size dependence argue for the observability of the Mott transition at finite temperature in the thermodynamic limit; and (c) the loss of spectral weight in the metal-to-Mott-insulator transition as a function of temperature and for strong interactions is momentum dependent, the hallmark of a pseudogap. That pseudogap spans a large region of the phase diagram near the Mott transition.