Subband filling and mott transition in Ca2-xSrxRuO4

A new concept is proposed for the paramagnetic metal insulator transition in the layer perovskite Ca2-xSrxRuO4. Whereas the pure Sr compound is metallic up to large Coulomb energies due to strong orbital fluctuations, structural changes induced by doping with Ca give rise to an interorbital charge transfer which makes the material extremely sensitive to local correlations. Using dynamical mean field theory based on finite temperature multiband exact diagonalization, it is shown that the combination of crystal field splitting and on-site Coulomb interactions leads to complete filling of the d(xy) band and to a Mott transition in the half-filled d(xz,yz) bands.