No Arabic abstract
We study three proposals for broken symmetry in the cuprate pseudogap - oxygen antiferromagnetism, $Theta_{II}$ orbital loop currents, and circulating currents involving apex oxygens - through numerical exploration of multi-orbital Hubbard models. Our numerically exact results show no evidence for the existence of oxygen antiferromagnetic order or the $Theta_{II}$ phase in the three-orbital Hubbard model. The model also fails to sustain an ordered current pattern even with the presence of additional apex oxygen orbitals. We thereby conclude that it is difficult to stabilize the aforementioned phases in the multi-orbital Hubbard models for parameters relevant to cuprate superconductors. However, the $Theta_{II}$ phase might be stabilized through explicit flux terms. We find an enhanced propensity for circulating currents with such terms in calculations simulating applied stress or strain, which skew the copper-oxygen plane to resemble a kagome lattice. We propose an experimental viewpoint to shed additional light on this problem.
A growing list of experiments show orthorhombic electronic anisotropy in the iron pnictides, in some cases at temperatures well above the spin density wave transition. These experiments include neutron scattering, resistivity and magnetoresistance measurements, and a variety of spectroscopies. We explore the idea that these anisotropies stem from a common underlying cause: orbital order manifest in an unequal occupation of $d_{xz}$ and $d_{yz}$ orbitals, arising from the coupled spin-orbital degrees of freedom. We emphasize the distinction between the total orbital occupation (the integrated density of states), where the order parameter may be small, and the orbital polarization near the Fermi level which can be more pronounced. We also discuss light-polarization studies of angle-resolved photoemission, and demonstrate how x-ray absorption linear dichroism may be used as a method to detect an orbital order parameter.
Charge density wave (CDW) order has been shown to compete and coexist with superconductivity in underdoped cuprates. Theoretical proposals for the CDW order include an unconventional $d$-symmetry form factor CDW, evidence for which has emerged from measurements, including resonant soft x-ray scattering (RSXS) in YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_{6+x}$ (YBCO). Here, we revisit RSXS measurements of the CDW symmetry in YBCO, using a variation in the measurement geometry to provide enhanced sensitivity to orbital symmetry. We show that the $(0 0.31 L)$ CDW peak measured at the Cu $L$ edge is dominated by an $s$ form factor rather than a $d$ form factor as was reported previously. In addition, by measuring both $(0.31 0 L)$ and $(0 0.31 L)$ peaks, we identify a pronounced difference in the orbital symmetry of the CDW order along the $a$ and $b$ axes, with the CDW along the $a$ axis exhibiting orbital order in addition to charge order.
By introducing the possibility of equal- and opposite-spin pairings concurrently, we show that the extended attractive Hubbard model (EAHM) exhibits rich ground state phase diagrams with a variety of singlet, triplet, and mixed parity superconducting orders. We study the competition between these superconducting pairing symmetries invoking an unrestricted Hartree-Fock- Bogoliubov-de Gennes (HFBdG) mean-field approach, and we use the d-vector formalism to characterize the nature of the stabilized superconducting orders. We discover that, while all other types of orders are suppressed, a non-unitary triplet order dominates the phase space in the presence of an in-plane external magnetic field. We also find a transition between a non-unitary to unitary superconducting phase driven by the change in average electron density. Our results serve as a reference for identifying and understanding the nature of superconductivity based on the symmetries of the pairing correlations. The results further highlight that EAHM is a suitable effective model for describing most of the pairing symmetries discovered in different materials.
Nematic order resulting from the partial melting of density-waves has been proposed as the mechanism to explain nematicity in iron-based superconductors. An outstanding question, however, is whether the microscopic electronic model for these systems -- the multi-orbital Hubbard model -- displays such an ordered state as its leading instability. In contrast to usual electronic instabilities, such as magnetic and charge order, this fluctuation-driven phenomenon cannot be captured by the standard RPA method. Here, by including fluctuations beyond RPA in the multi-orbital Hubbard model, we derive its nematic susceptibility and contrast it with its ferro-orbital order susceptibility, showing that its leading instability is the spin-driven nematic phase. Our results also demonstrate the primary role played by the $d_{xy}$ orbital in driving the nematic transition, and reveal that high-energy magnetic fluctuations are essential to stabilize nematic order in the absence of magnetic order.
The Hubbard model with local on-site repulsion is generally thought to possess a superconducting ground-state for appropriate parameters, but the effects of more realistic long-range Coulomb interactions have not been studied extensively. We study the influence of these interactions on superconductivity by including nearest and next-nearest neighbor extended Hubbard interactions in addition to the usual on-site terms. Utilizing numerical exact diagonalization, we analyze the signatures of superconductivity in the ground states through the fidelity metric of quantum information theory. We find that nearest and next-nearest neighbor interactions have thresholds above which they destabilize superconductivity regardless of whether they are attractive or repulsive, seemingly due to competing charge fluctuations.