No Arabic abstract
It has been recently shown that the competition between unscreened Coulomb and Fr{o}hlich electron-phonon interactions can be described in terms of a short-range spin exchange $J_p$ and an effective on-site interaction $tilde{U}$ in the framework of the polaronic $t$-$J_p$-$tilde{U}$ model. This model, that provides an explanation for high temperature superconductivity in terms of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of small and light bipolarons, is now studied as a charged Bose-Fermi mixture. Within this approximation, we show that a gap between bipolaron and unpaired polaron bands results in a strong suppression of low-temperature spin susceptibility, specific heat and tunneling conductance, signaling the presence of normal state pseudogap without any assumptions on preexisting orders or broken symmetries in the normal state of the model.
In the last years ample experimental evidence has shown that charge carriers in high-temperature superconductors are strongly correlated but also coupled with lattice vibrations (phonons), signaling that the true origin of high-Tc superconductivity can only be found in a proper combination of Coulomb and electron-phonon interactions. On this basis, we propose and study a model for high-Tc superconductivity, which accounts for realistic Coulomb repulsion, strong electron-phonon (Frohlich) interaction and residual on-site (Hubbard tilde{U}) correlations without any ad-hoc assumptions on their relative strength and interaction range. In the framework of this model, which exhibits a phase transition to a superconducting state with a critical temperature Tc well in excess of 100K, we emphasize the role of tilde{U} as the driving parameter for a BEC/BCS crossover. Our model lays a microscopic foundation for the polaron-bipolaron theory of superconductivity. We argue that the high-Tc phenomenon originates in competing Coulomb and Frohlich interactions beyond the conventional BCS description.
We report analytical and numerical results on the two-particle states of the polaronic t-Jp model derived recently with realistic Coulomb and electron-phonon (Frohlich) interactions in doped polar insulators. Eigenstates and eigenvalues are calculated for two different geometries. Our results show that the ground state is a bipolaronic singlet, made up of two polarons. The bipolaron size increases with increasing ratio of the polaron hopping integral t to the exchange interaction Jp but remains small compared to the system size in the whole range 0<t/Jp<1. Furthermore, the model exhibits a phase transition to a superconducting state with a critical temperature well in excess of 100K. In the range t/Jp<1, there are distinct charge and spin gaps opening in the density of states, specific heat, and magnetic susceptibility well above Tc.
A number of spectacular experimental anomaliescite{li-2007,fujita-2005} have recently been discovered in certain cuprates, notably {LBCO} and {LNSCO}, which exhibit unidirectional spin and charge order (known as ``stripe order). We have recently proposed to interpret these observations as evidence for a novel ``striped superconducting state, in which the superconducting order parameter is modulated in space, such that its average is precisely zero. Here, we show that thermal melting of the striped superconducting state can lead to a number of unusual phases, of which the most novel is a charge $4e$ superconducting state, with a corresponding fractional flux quantum $hc/4e$. These are never-before observed states of matter, and ones, moreover, that cannot arise from the conventional Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) mechanism. Thus, direct confirmation of their existence, even in a small subset of the cuprates, could have much broader implications for our understanding of high temperature superconductivity. We propose experiments to observe fractional flux quantization, which thereby could confirm the existence of these states.
We show that, at weak to intermediate coupling, antiferromagnetic fluctuations enhance d-wave pairing correlations until, as one moves closer to half-filling, the antiferromagnetically-induced pseudogap begins to suppress the tendency to superconductivity. The accuracy of our approach is gauged by detailed comparisons with Quantum Monte Carlo simulations. The negative pressure dependence of Tc and the existence of photoemission hot spots in electron-doped cuprate superconductors find their natural explanation within this approach.
The energy gap for electronic excitations is one of the most important characteristics of the superconducting state, as it directly refects the pairing of electrons. In the copper-oxide high temperature superconductors (HTSCs), a strongly anisotropic energy gap, which vanishes along high symmetry directions, is a clear manifestation of the d-wave symmetry of the pairing. There is, however, a dramatic change in the form of the gap anisotropy with reduced carrier concentration (underdoping). Although the vanishing of the gap along the diagonal to the square Cu-O bond directions is robust, the doping dependence of the large gap along the Cu-O directions suggests that its origin might be different from pairing. It is thus tempting to associate the large gap with a second order parameter distinct from superconductivity. We use angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) to show that the two-gap behavior, and the destruction of well defined electronic excitations, are not universal features of HTSCs, and depend sensitively on how the underdoped materials are prepared. Depending on cation substitution, underdoped samples either show two-gap behavior or not. In contrast, many other characteristics of HTSCs, such as the domelike dependence of Tc on doping, long-lived excitations along the diagonals to the Cu-O bonds, energy gap at the antinode (crossing of the underlying Fermi surface and the (pi, 0)-(pi, pi) line) decreasing monotonically with doping, while persisting above Tc (the pseudogap), are present in all samples, irrespective of whether they exhibit two-gap behavior or not. Our results imply that universal aspects of high Tc superconductivity are relatively insensitive to differences in the electronic states along the Cu-O bond directions.