No Arabic abstract
Charge-density waves are responsible for symmetry-breaking displacements of atoms and concomitant changes in the electronic structure. Linear response theories, in particular density-functional perturbation theory, provide a way to study the effect of displacements on both the total energy and the electronic structure based on a single ab initio calculation. In downfolding approaches, the electronic system is reduced to a smaller number of bands, allowing for the incorporation of additional correlation and environmental effects on these bands. However, the physical contents of this downfolded model and its potential limitations are not always obvious. Here, we study the potential-energy landscape and electronic structure of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model, where all relevant quantities can be evaluated analytically. We compare the exact results at arbitrary displacement with diagrammatic perturbation theory both in the full model and in a downfolded effective single-band model, which gives an instructive insight into the properties of downfolding. An exact reconstruction of the potential-energy landscape is possible in a downfolded model, which requires a dynamical electron-biphonon interaction. The dispersion of the bands upon atomic displacement is also found correctly, where the downfolded model by construction only captures spectral weight in the target space. In the SSH model, the electron-phonon coupling mechanism involves exclusively hybridization between the low- and high-energy bands and this limits the computational efficiency gain of downfolded models.
Over the last several years, a new generation of quantum simulations has greatly expanded our understanding of charge density wave phase transitions in Hamiltonians with coupling between local phonon modes and the on-site charge density. A quite different, and interesting, case is one in which the phonons live on the bonds, and hence modulate the electron hopping. This situation, described by the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) Hamiltonian, has so far only been studied with quantum Monte Carlo in one dimension. Here we present results for the 2D SSH model, and show that a bond ordered wave (BOW) insulator is present in the ground state at half-filling, and argue that a critical value of the electron-phonon coupling is required for its onset, in contradistinction with the 1D case where BOW exists for any nonzero coupling. We determine the precise nature of the bond ordering pattern, which has hitherto been controversial, and the critical transition temperature, which is associated with a spontaneous breaking of ${cal Z}_4$ symmetry.
We use Langevin sampling methods within the auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo algorithm to investigate the phases of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model on the square lattice at the O(4) symmetric point. Based on an explicit determination of the density of zeros of the fermion determinant, we argue that this method is efficient in the adiabatic limit. By analyzing dynamical and static quantities of the model, we demonstrate that a $(pi,pi)$ valence bond solid gives way to an antiferromagnetic phase with increasing phonon frequency.
Topological physics strongly relies on prototypical lattice model with particular symmetries. We report here on a theoretical and experimental work on acoustic waveguides that is directly mapped to the one-dimensional Su-Schrieffer-Heeger chiral model. Starting from the continuous two dimensional wave equation we use a combination of monomadal approximation and the condition of equal length tube segments to arrive at the wanted discrete equations. It is shown that open or closed boundary conditions topological leads automatically to the existence of edge modes. We illustrate by graphical construction how the edge modes appear naturally owing to a quarter-wavelength condition and the conservation of flux. Furthermore, the transparent chirality of our system, which is ensured by the geometrical constraints allows us to study chiral disorder numerically and experimentally. Our experimental results in the audible regime demonstrate the predicted robustness of the topological edge modes.
We consider two interacting bosons in a dimerized Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) lattice. We identify a rich variety of two-body states. In particular, for open boundary conditions and moderate interactions, edge bound states (EBS) are present even for the dimerization that does not sustain single-particle edge states. Moreover, for large values of the interactions, we find a breaking of the standard bulk-boundary correspondence. Based on the mapping of two interacting particles in one dimension onto a single particle in two dimensions, we propose an experimentally realistic coupled optical fibers setup as quantum simulator of the two-body SSH model. This setup is able to highlight the localization properties of the states as well as the presence of a resonant scattering mechanism provided by a bound state that crosses the scattering continuum, revealing the closed-channel population in real time and real space.
We study a single polaron in the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model using four different techniques (three numerical and one analytical). Polarons show a smooth crossover from weak to strong coupling, as a function of the electron-phonon coupling strength $lambda$, in all models where this coupling depends only on phonon momentum $q$. In the SSH model the coupling also depends on the electron momentum $k$; we find it has a sharp transition, at a critical coupling strength $lambda_c$, between states with zero and nonzero momentum of the ground state. All other properties of the polaron are also singular at $lambda = lambda_c$, except the average number of phonons in the polaronic cloud. This result is representative of all polarons with coupling depending on $k$ and $q$, and will have important experimental consequences (eg., in ARPES and conductivity experiments).