No Arabic abstract
Despite more than three decades of tireless efforts, the nature of high-temperature superconductivity (HTS) remains a mystery. A recently proposed long-distance effective field theory, accounting for all the universal features of HTS and the equally mysterious pseudogap phase, related them to the coexistence of a charge condensate with a condensate of dyons, particles carrying both magnetic and electric charges. Central to this picture are magnetic monopoles emerging in the proximity of the topological quantum superconductor-insulator transition (SIT) that dominates the HTS phase diagram. However, the mechanism responsible for spatially localized electron pairing, characteristic of HTS, remains a puzzle. Here we show that real-space, localized electron pairing is mediated by magnetic monopoles and occurs at temperatures well above the superconducting transition temperature $T_{mathrm c}$. Localized electron pairing promotes the formation of superconducting granules connected by Josephson links. Global superconductivity sets in when these granules form an infinite cluster at $T_{mathrm c}$ which is estimated to fall in the range from hundred to thousand Kelvins. Our findings pave the way to tailoring materials with elevated superconducting transition temperatures.
To identify the microscopic mechanism of heavy-fermion Cooper pairing is an unresolved challenge in quantum matter studies; it may also relate closely to finding the pairing mechanism of high temperature superconductivity. Magnetically mediated Cooper pairing has long been the conjectured basis of heavy-fermion superconductivity but no direct verification of this hypothesis was achievable. Here, we use a novel approach based on precision measurements of the heavy-fermion band structure using quasiparticle interference (QPI) imaging, to reveal quantitatively the momentum-space (k-space) structure of the f-electron magnetic interactions of CeCoIn5. Then, by solving the superconducting gap equations on the two heavy-fermion bands $E_k^{alpha,beta}$ with these magnetic interactions as mediators of the Cooper pairing, we derive a series of quantitative predictions about the superconductive state. The agreement found between these diverse predictions and the measured characteristics of superconducting CeCoIn5, then provides direct evidence that the heavy-fermion Cooper pairing is indeed mediated by the f-electron magnetism.
We have computed alpha^2Fs for the hole-doped cuprates within the framework of the one-band Hubbard model, where the full magnetic response of the system is treated properly. The d-wave pairing weight alpha^2F_d is found to contain not only a low energy peak due to excitations near (pi,pi) expected from neutron scattering data, but to also display substantial spectral weight at higher energies due to contributions from other parts of the Brillouin zone as well as pairbreaking ferromagnetic excitations at low energies. The resulting solutions of the Eliashberg equations yield transition temperatures and gaps comparable to the experimentally observed values, suggesting that magnetic excitations of both high and low energies play an important role in providing the pairing glue in the cuprates.
We investigate pairing mechanism in multiband superconductors. To put our feet on firm ground, unbiased renormalization group analysis is carried out for iron-based superconductors. It is quite remarkable that, after integrating out quantum fluctuations, the renormalization-group flows agree exceedingly well with a mean-field Hamiltonian where interband pair hopping plays an essential role. Through interband pair hopping, electrons can overcome the repulsive interaction between them and form resonating Cooper pairs between different bands. Unlike the conventional superconductors, the pairing mechanism in multiband superconductors is resonating pair hopping between different bands, just like the resonating chemical bonds in benzene. The effective mean-field Hamiltonian spots a small parameter dictating the critical temperature and also explains how interband pair hopping always enahnces spin fluctuations at the nesting momentum connecting the Fermi surfaces. In short, no attractive glue is needed and resonating interband pair hopping is the key to Cooper pair formation in unconventional superconductors. Implications to cuprates and related issues are also discussed at the end.
The elementary CuO2 plane sustaining cuprate high-temperature superconductivity occurs typically at the base of a periodic array of edge-sharing CuO5 pyramids (Fig 1a). Virtual transitions of electrons between adjacent planar Cu and O atoms, occurring at a rate $t/{hbar}$ and across the charge-transfer energy gap E, generate superexchange spin-spin interactions of energy $Japprox4t^4/E^3$ in an antiferromagnetic correlated-insulator state1. Hole doping the CuO2 plane disrupts this magnetic order while perhaps retaining superexchange interactions, thus motivating a hypothesis of spin-singlet electron-pair formation at energy scale J as the mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity. Although the response of the superconductors electron-pair wavefunction $Psiequiv<c_uparrow c_downarrow>$ to alterations in E should provide a direct test of such hypotheses, measurements have proven impracticable. Focus has turned instead to the distance ${delta}$ between each Cu atom and the O atom at the apex of its CuO5 pyramid. Varying ${delta}$ should alter the Coulomb potential at the planar Cu and O atoms, modifying E and thus J, and thereby controlling ${Psi}$ in a predictable manner. Here we implement atomic-scale imaging of E and ${Psi}$, both as a function of the periodic modulation in ${delta}$ that occurs naturally in $Bi_2Sr_2CaCu_2O_{8+x}$. We demonstrate that the responses of E and ${Psi}$ to varying ${delta}$, and crucially those of ${Psi}$ to the varying E, conform to theoretical predictions. These data provide direct atomic-scale verification that charge-transfer superexchange is key to the electron-pairing mechanism in the hole-doped cuprate superconductor ${Bi_2Sr_2CaCu_2O_{8+x}}$.
We studied pairing mechanism of the heavily electron doped FeSe (HEDIS) systems, which commonly have one incipient hole band -- a band top below the Fermi level by a finite energy distance $epsilon_b$ -- at $Gamma$ point and ordinary electron bands at $M$ points in Brillouin zone (BZ). We found that the system allows two degenerate superconducting solutions with the exactly same $T_c$ in clean limit: the incipient $s^{pm}_{he}$-gap ($Delta_h^{-} eq 0$, $Delta_e^{+} eq 0$) and $s_{ee}^{++}$-gap ($Delta_h =0$, $Delta_e^{+} eq 0$) solutions with different pairing cutoffs, $Lambda_{sf}$ (spin fluctuation energy) and $epsilon_b$, respectively. The $s_{ee}^{++}$-gap solution, in which the system dynamically renormalizes the original pairing cutoff $Lambda_{sf}$ to $Lambda_{phys}=epsilon_b$ ($< Lambda_{sf}$), therefore actively eliminates the incipient hole band from forming Cooper pairs, but without loss of $T_c$, becomes immune to the impurity pair-breaking. As a result, the HEDIS systems, by dynamically tuning the pairing cutoff and selecting the $s_{ee}^{++}$-pairing state, can always achieve the maximum $T_c$ -- the $T_c$ of the degenerate $s^{pm}_{he}$ solution in the ideal clean limit -- latent in the original pairing interactions, even in dirty limit.