Origin of the Mott Gap

We show exactly that the only charged excitations that exist in the strong-coupling limit of the half-filled Hubbard model are gapped composite excitations generated by the dynamics of the charge \(2e\) boson that appears upon explicit integration of the high-energy scale. At every momentum, such excitations have non-zero spectral weight at two distinct energy scales separated by the on-site repulsion \(U\). The result is a gap in the spectrum for the composite excitations accompanied by a discontinuous vanishing of the density of states at the chemical potential when \(U\) exceeds the bandwidth. Consequently, we resolve the long-standing problem of the cause of the charge gap in a half-filled band in the absence of symmetry breaking.