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 V2O3 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.
Acknowledgement
We thank B. Laughlin, B. A. Bernevig and D. Giuliano for valuable discussions.