Weakly coupled Hubbard chains at half-filling and confinement

We study two (very) weakly-coupled Hubbard chains in the half-filled case, and especially the situation where the intrachain Mott scale m is much larger than the bare single-electron interchain hopping t_⊥. First, we find that the divergence of the intrachain Umklapp channel at the Mott transition results in the complete vanishing of the single-electron interchain hopping: This is significant of a strong confinement of coherence along the chains. Excitations are usual charge fermionic solitons and spinon pairs of the Heisenberg chain. Then, we show rigorously how the tunneling of spinon-pairs produces a magnetic interchain exchange J_⊥=t_⊥2/m>:0. The result is an insulating state with spin-gapped excitations as in the delocalized limit (i.e. for rather large interchain hoppings), where the two-leg ladder is in the well-known D-Mott phase. Unlike for Bechgaard salts, the confinement/deconfinement transition at absolute zero is here a simple crossover: no metallic phase is found in undoped two-leg ladders. This statement might be generalized for N-leg ladders with N=3,4… (but not too large).