No Arabic abstract
We study the competition between unconventional superconducting pairing and charge density wave (CDW) formation for the two-dimensional Edwards Hamiltonian at half filling, a very general two-dimensional transport model in which fermionic charge carriers couple to a correlated background medium. Using the projective renormalization method we find that a strong renormalization of the original fermionic band causes a new hole-like Fermi surface to emerge near the center of the Brillouin zone, before it eventually gives rise to the formation of a charge density wave. On the new, disconnected parts of the Fermi surface superconductivity is induced with a sign-changing order parameter. We discuss these findings in the light of recent experiments on iron-based oxypnictide superconductors.
One of the fundamental questions about the high temperature cuprate superconductors is the size of the Fermi surface (FS) underlying the superconducting state. By analyzing the single particle spectral function for the Fermi Hubbard model as a function of repulsion $U$ and chemical potential $mu$, we find that the Fermi surface in the normal state reconstructs from a large Fermi surface matching the Luttinger volume as expected in a Fermi liquid, to a Fermi surface that encloses fewer electrons that we dub the Luttinger Breaking (LB) phase, as the Mott insulator is approached. This transition into a non-Fermi liquid phase that violates the Luttinger count, is a continuous phase transition at a critical density in the absence of any other broken symmetry. We obtain the Fermi surface contour from the spectral weight $A_{vec{k}}(omega=0)$ and from an analysis of the poles and zeros of the retarded Greens function $G_{vec{k}}^{ret}(E=0)$, calculated using determinantal quantum Monte Carlo and analytic continuation methods.We discuss our numerical results in connection with experiments on Hall measurements, scanning tunneling spectroscopy and angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy.
One of the distinctive features of hole-doped cuprate superconductors is the onset of a `pseudogap below a temperature $T^*$. Recent experiments suggest that there may be a connection between the existence of the pseudogap and the topology of the Fermi surface. Here, we address this issue by studying the two-dimensional Hubbard model with two distinct numerical methods. We find that the pseudogap only exists when the Fermi surface is hole-like and that, for a broad range of parameters, its opening is concomitant with a Fermi surface topology change from electron- to hole-like. We identify a common link between these observations: the pole-like feature of the electronic self-energy associated with the formation of the pseudogap is found to also control the degree of particle-hole asymmetry, and hence the Fermi surface topology transition. We interpret our results in the framework of an SU(2) gauge theory of fluctuating antiferromagnetism. We show that a mean-field treatment of this theory in a metallic state with U(1) topological order provides an explanation of this pole-like feature, and a good description of our numerical results. We discuss the relevance of our results to experiments on cuprates.
The interplay of interactions and disorder in two-dimensional (2D) electron systems has actively been studied for decades. The paradigmatic approach involves starting with a clean Fermi liquid and perturbing the system with both disorder and interactions. We instead start with a clean non-Fermi liquid near a 2D ferromagnetic quantum critical point and consider the effects of disorder. In contrast with the disordered Fermi liquid, we find that our model does not suffer from runaway flows to strong coupling and the system has a marginally stable fixed point with perfect conduction.
Insulators occur in more than one guise, a recent finding was a class of topological insulators, which host a conducting surface juxtaposed with an insulating bulk. Here we report the observation of an unusual insulating state with an electrically insulating bulk that simultaneously yields bulk quantum oscillations with characteristics of an unconventional Fermi liquid. We present quantum oscillation measurements of magnetic torque in high purity single crystals of the Kondo insulator SmB6, which reveal quantum oscillation frequencies characteristic of a large three-dimensional conduction electron Fermi surface similar to the metallic rare earth hexaborides such as PrB6 and LaB6. The quantum oscillation amplitude strongly increases at low temperatures, appearing strikingly at variance with conventional metallic behaviour.
A precursor effect on the Fermi surface in the two-dimensional Hubbard model at finite temperatures near the antiferromagnetic instability is studied using three different itinerant approaches: the second order perturbation theory, the paramagnon theory (PT), and the two-particle self-consistent (TPSC) approach. In general, at finite temperature, the Fermi surface of the interacting electron systems is not sharply defined due to the broadening effects of the self-energy. In order to take account of those effects we consider the single-particle spectral function $A({bf k},0)$ at the Fermi level, to describe the counterpart of the Fermi surface at T=0. We find that the Fermi surface is destroyed close to the pseudogap regime due to the spin-fluctuation effects in both PT and TPSC approaches. Moreover, the top of the effective valence band is located around ${bf k}=(pi/2,pi/2)$ in agreement with earlier investigations on the single-hole motion in the antiferromagnetic background. A crossover behavior from the Fermi-liquid regime to the pseudogap regime is observed in the electron concentration dependence of the spectral function and the self-energy.