The dissociation of excitons into a liquid of holes and electrons in photoexcited semiconductors, despite being one of the first recognized examples of a Mott transition, still defies a complete understanding, especially regarding the nature of the transition, which is found continuous in some cases and discontinuous in others. Here we consider an idealized model of photoexcited semiconductors that can be mapped onto a spin-polarised half-filled Hubbard model, whose phase diagram reproduces most of the phenomenology of those systems and uncovers the key role of the exciton binding energy in determining the nature of the exciton Mott transition. We find indeed that the transition changes from discontinuous to continuous as the binding energy increases. Moreover, we uncover a rather anomalous electron-hole liquid phase next to the transition, which still sustains excitonic excitations despite being a degenerate Fermi liquid of heavy mass quasiparticles. arXiv:1810.01843v2 [cond-mat.str-el]

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We show that a generic single-orbital Anderson impurity model, lacking for instance any kind of particle-hole symmetry, can be exactly mapped without any constraint onto a resonant level model coupled to two Ising variables, which reduce to one if the hybridisation is particle-hole symmetric. The mean-field solution of this model is found to be stable to unphysical spontaneous magnetisation of the impurity, unlike the saddle-point solution in the standard slave-boson representation. Remarkably, the mean-field estimate of the Wilson ratio approaches the exact value RW = 2 in the Kondo regime.

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We study the "phase diagram" of a Hubbard plaquette with Rashba spin-orbit coupling. We show that the peculiar way in which Rashba coupling breaks the spin-rotational symmetry of the Hubbard model allows a mixing of singlet and triplet components in the ground-state that slows down and it changes the nature of the Mott transition and of the Mott insulating phases. arXiv:1712.05618v2 [cond-mat.str-el]