Theory of a Continuous Bandwidth-tuned Wigner-Mott Transition

We develop a theory for a continuous bandwidth-tuned transition at fixed fractional electron filling from a metal with a generic Fermi surface to a `Wigner-Mott' insulator that spontaneously breaks crystalline space-group symmetries. Across the quantum critical point, (i) the entire electronic Fermi surface disappears abruptly upon approaching from the metallic side, and (ii) the insulating charge gap and various order-parameters associated with the spontaneously broken space-group symmetries vanish continuously upon approaching from the insulating side. Additionally, though the electronic Fermi surface vanishes, the spinon Fermi surface remains on the insulating side. We present a framework for describing such continuous metal-insulator transitions (MIT) and analyze the example of a bandwidth-tuned transition at a filling, $\nu=1/6$, for spinful electrons on the triangular lattice. By extending the theory to a certain large-$N$ limit, we provide a concrete example of such a continuous MIT and discuss numerous experimental signatures near the critical point. We place our results in the context of recent experiments in moir\'e transition metal dichalcogenide materials.