Mott criticality as the confinement transition of a pseudogap-Mott metal

Abstract The phenomenon of Mott insulation involves the localisation of itinerant electrons due to strong local repulsion. Upon doping, a pseudogap (PG) phase emerges—marked by selective gapping of the Fermi surface without conventional symmetry breaking in spin or charge channels. A key challenge is understanding how quasiparticle breakdown in the Fermi liquid (FL) gives rise to this enigmatic state, and how it connects to both the Mott insulating and superconducting phases. Here, we develop a renormalisation-based construction of strongly correlated lattice models that captures the emergence of the PG phase and its transition to a Mott insulator. Applying a many-body tiling scheme to the fixed-point impurity model uncovers a lattice model with electron interactions and Kondo physics. At half-filling, the interplay between Kondo screening and bath charge fluctuations in the impurity model leads to FL breakdown. This reveals a PG phase characterised by a non-FL (the Mott metal) residing on nodal arcs, gapped antinodal regions of the Fermi surface, and an anomalous scaling of the electronic scattering rate with frequency. The eventual confinement of holon–doublon excitations of this exotic metal obtains a continuous transition into the Mott insulator. Our results identify the PG as a distinct long-range entangled quantum phase, and offer a new route to Mott criticality beyond the paradigm of local quantum criticality.