No Arabic abstract
The discovery of enhanced superconductivity (SC) in FeSe films grown on SrTiO3 (FeSe/STO) has revitalized the field of Fe-based superconductors. In the ultrathin limit, the superconducting transition temperature Tc is increased by almost an order of magnitude, raising new questions on the pairing mechanism. As in other unconventional superconductors, antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations have been proposed as a candidate to mediate SC in this system. Thus, it is essential to study the evolution of the spin dynamics of FeSe in the ultrathin limit to elucidate their relationship with superconductivity. Here, we investigate and compare the spin excitations in bulk and monolayer FeSe grown on STO using high-resolution resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) and quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) calculations. Despite the absence of long-range magnetic order, bulk FeSe displays dispersive magnetic excitations reminiscent of other Fe-pnictides. Conversely, the spin excitations in FeSe/STO are gapped, dispersionless, and significantly hardened relative to the bulk counterpart. By comparing our RIXS results with simulations of a bilayer Hubbard model, we connect the evolution of the spin excitations to the Fermiology of the two systems. The present study reveals a remarkable reconfiguration of spin excitations in FeSe/STO, which is essential to understand the role of spin fluctuations in the pairing mechanism.
Bulk FeSe superconducts inside a nematic phase, that sets in through an orthorhombic distortion of the high temperature tetragonal phase. Bulk non-alloy tetragonal superconducting FeSe does not exist as yet. This raises the question whether nematicity is fundamental to superconductivity. We employ an advanced ab-initio ability and show that bulk tetragonal FeSe can, in principle, superconduct at almost the same Tc as the orthorhombic phase had that been the ground state. Further, we perform rigorous benchmarking of our theoretical spin susceptibilities against experimentally observed data over all energies and relevant momentum direction. We show that susceptibilities computed in both the tetragonal and orthorhombic phases already have the correct momentum structure at all energies, but not the desired intensity. The enhanced nematicity that simulates the correct spin fluctuation intensity can only lead to a maximum 10-15% increment in the superconducting Tc . Our results suggest while nematicity may be intrinsic property of the bulk FeSe, is not the primary force driving the superconducting pairing.
We compare electronic structures of single FeSe layer films on SrTiO$_3$ substrate (FeSe/STO) and K$_x$Fe$_{2-y}$Se$_{2}$ superconductors obtained from extensive LDA and LDA+DMFT calculations with the results of ARPES experiments. It is demonstrated that correlation effects on Fe-3d states are sufficient in principle to explain the formation of the shallow electron -- like bands at the M(X)-point. However, in FeSe/STO these effects alone are apparently insufficient for the simultaneous elimination of the hole -- like Fermi surface around the $Gamma$-point which is not observed in ARPES experiments. Detailed comparison of ARPES detected and calculated quasiparticle bands shows reasonable agreement between theory and experiment. Analysis of the bands with respect to their origin and orbital composition shows, that for FeSe/STO system the experimentally observed replica quasiparticle band at the M-point (usually attributed to forward scattering interactions with optical phonons in SrTiO$_3$ substrate) can be reasonably understood just as the LDA calculated Fe-3d$_{xy}$ band, renormalized by electronic correlations. The only manifestation of the substrate reduces to lifting the degeneracy between Fe-3d$_{xz}$ and Fe-3d$_{yz}$ bands in the vicinity of M-point. For the case of K$_x$Fe$_{2-y}$Se$_{2}$ most bands observed in ARPES can also be understood as correlation renormalized Fe-3d LDA calculated bands, with overall semi -- quantitative agreement with LDA+DMFT calculations.
The interplay of orbital and spin degrees of freedom is the fundamental characteristic in numerous condensed matter phenomena, including high temperature superconductivity, quantum spin liquids, and topological semimetals. In iron-based superconductors (FeSCs), this causes superconductivity to emerge in the vicinity of two other instabilities: nematic and magnetic. Unveiling the mutual relationship among nematic order, spin fluctuations, and superconductivity has been a major challenge for research in FeSCs, but it is still controversial. Here, by carrying out 77Se nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements on FeSe single crystals, doped by cobalt and sulfur that serve as control parameters, we demonstrate that the superconducting transition temperature Tc increases in proportion to the strength of spin fluctuations, while it is independent of the nematic transition temperature Tnem. Our observation therefore directly implies that superconductivity in FeSe is essentially driven by spin fluctuations in the intermediate coupling regime, while nematic fluctuations have a marginal impact on Tc.
The weakly coupled quasi-one-dimensional spin ladder compound (CH$_3$)$_2$CHNH$_3$CuCl$_3$ is studied by neutron scattering in magnetic fields exceeding the critical field of Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons. Commensurate long-range order and the associated Goldstone mode are detected and found to be similar to those in a reference 3D quantum magnet. However, for the upper two massive magnon branches the observed behavior is totally different, culminating in a drastic collapse of excitation bandwidth beyond the transition point.
We study the magnetic and charge dynamical response of a Hubbard model in a two-leg ladder geometry using the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) method and the random phase approximation within the fluctuation-exchange approximation (RPA+FLEX). Our calculations reveal that RPA+FLEX can capture the main features of the magnetic response from weak up to intermediate Hubbard repulsion for doped ladders, when compared with the numerically exact DMRG results. However, while at weak Hubbard repulsion both the spin and charge spectra can be understood in terms of weakly-interacting electron-hole excitations across the Fermi surface, at intermediate coupling DMRG shows gapped spin excitations at large momentum transfer that remain gapless within the RPA+FLEX approximation. For the charge response, RPA+FLEX can only reproduce the main features of the DMRG spectra at weak coupling and high doping levels, while it shows an incoherent character away from this limit. Overall, our analysis shows that RPA+FLEX works surprisingly well for spin excitations at weak and intermediate Hubbard $U$ values even in the difficult low-dimensional geometry such as a two-leg ladder. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results for neutron scattering and resonant inelastic x-ray scattering experiments on two-leg ladder cuprate compounds.