Attractive effect of a strong electronic repulsion -- the physics of vertex divergences

While the breakdown of the perturbation expansion for the many-electron problem has several manifestations at the formal level, such as divergences of irreducible vertex functions and crossing of solutions in the Luttinger-Ward functional, here we unveil its physical effect. It corresponds to flipping the sign of the effective electronic interaction from repulsive to attractive in specific scattering channels. By decomposing the local and uniform susceptibilities of the Hubbard model in terms of their spectral representations, we prove how entering the non-perturbative regime causes an enhancement of the charge response, ultimately responsible for the phase-separation instabilities close to the Mott Hubbard MIT. Our analysis opens a new route for understanding phase-transitions in the non-perturbative regime and clarifies why attractive effects emerging from a strong repulsion can induce phase-separations, but not (s-wave) pairing or charge-density wave instabilities.