No Arabic abstract
Using a nonequilibrium implementation of the Lanczos-based exact diagonalisation technique we study the possibility of the light-induced superconducting phase coherence in a solid state system after an ultrafast optical excitation. In particular, we investigate the buildup of superconducting correlations by calculating an exact time-dependent wave function reflecting the properties of the system in non-equilibrium and the corresponding transient response functions. Within our picture we identify a possible transient Meissner effect after dynamical quenching of the non-superconducting wavefunction and extract a characteristic superfluid density that we compare to experimental data. Finally, we find that the stability of the induced superconducting state depends crucially on the nature of the excitation quench: namely, a pure interaction quench induces a long-lived superconducting state, whereas a phase quench leads to a short-lived transient superconductor.
We present the results of numerical studies of superconductivity and antiferromagnetism in a strongly correlated electron system. To do this we construct a Hubbard model on a lattice of self-consistently embedded multi-site clusters by means of a dynamical mean-field theory in which intra-cluster dynamics is treated essentially exactly. We show that a class of characteristic features which have been seen in the excitation spectra of high-$T_{c}$ cuprates (e.g., pseudogap and the spin-flip resonance), as well as their interplay with the onset of a pairing correlations, can be captured within a dynamical mean-field theory in which short-wavelength dynamics are rigorously treated. Thus we infer that the observation of the neutron scattering resonance in the superconducting state of the cuprate superconductors does not appear to be directly tied to their quasi-2D character. Although our approach is defined strictly in terms of fermion degrees of freedom, we show that we can readily identify the emergence of effective low energy bosonic degrees of freedom in the presence of a well-defined broken symmetry phase as long as their dynamics are dominated by short-range, short-wavelength fluctuations. Our results reveal that the dynamics of staggered spin degrees of freedom builds up coherence and a resonance-like sharp feature emerges as pairing correlations set in. Under conditions of superconducting broken symmetry our approach thus extends static BCS mean field theory to provide an exact treatment of quantum fluctuations of the BCS order parameter.
We use a Luttinger-Ward functional approach to study the problem of phonon-mediated superconductivity in electron systems with strong electron-electron interactions (EEIs). Our derivation does not rely on an expansion in skeleton diagrams for the EEI and the resulting theory is therefore nonperturbative in the strength of the latter. We show that one of the building blocks of the theory is the irreducible six-leg vertex related to EEIs. Diagrammatically, this implies five contributions (one of the Fock and four of the Hartree type) to the electronic self-energy, which, to the best of our knowledge, have never been discussed in the literature. Our approach is applicable to (and in fact designed to tackle superconductivity in) strongly correlated electron systems described by generic lattice models, as long as the glue for electron pairing is provided by phonons.
We use femtosecond optical spectroscopy to systematically measure the primary energy relaxation rate k1 of photoexcited carriers in cuprate and pnictide superconductors. We find that k1 increases monotonically with increased negative strain in the crystallographic a-axis. Generally, the Bardeen-Shockley deformation potential theorem and, specifically, pressure-induced Raman shifts reported in the literature suggest that increased negative strain enhances electron-phonon coupling, which implies that the observed direct correspondence between a and k1 is consistent with the canonical assignment of k1 to the electron-phonon interaction. The well-known non-monotonic dependence of the superconducting critical temperature Tc on the a-axis strain is also reflected in a systematic dependence Tc on k1, with a distinct maximum at intermediate values (~16 ps-1 at room temperature). The empirical non-monotonic systematic variation of Tc with the strength of the electron-phonon interaction provides us with unique insight into the role of electron-phonon interaction in relation to the mechanism of high-Tc superconductivity as a crossover phenomenon.
We present a novel route for attaining unconventional superconductivity (SC) in a strongly correlated system without doping. In a simple model of a correlated band insulator (BI) at half-filling we demonstrate, based on a generalization of the projected wavefunctions method, that SC emerges when e-e interactions and the bare band-gap are both much larger than the kinetic energy, provided the system has sufficient frustration against the magnetic order. As the interactions are tuned, SC appears sandwiched between the correlated BI followed by a paramagnetic metal on one side, and a ferrimagnetic metal, antiferromagnetic (AF) half-metal, and AF Mott insulator phases on the other side.
We solve by Dynamical Mean Field Theory a toy-model which has a phase diagram strikingly similar to that of high $T_c$ superconductors: a bell-shaped superconducting region adjacent the Mott insulator and a normal phase that evolves from a conventional Fermi liquid to a pseudogapped semi-metal as the Mott transition is approached. Guided by the physics of the impurity model that is self-consistently solved within Dynamical Mean Field Theory, we introduce an analytical ansatz to model the dynamical behavior across the various phases which fits very accurately the numerical data. The ansatz is based on the assumption that the wave-function renormalization, that is very severe especially in the pseudogap phase close to the Mott transition, is perfectly canceled by the vertex corrections in the Cooper pairing channel.A remarkable outcome is that a superconducting state can develop even from a pseudogapped normal state, in which there are no low-energy quasiparticles. The overall physical scenario that emerges, although unraveled in a specific model and in an infinite-coordination Bethe lattice, can be interpreted in terms of so general arguments to suggest that it can be realized in other correlated systems.