No Arabic abstract
We study the pairing and superconducting properties of the attractive Hubbard model in two quasi one-dimensional topological lattices: the Creutz and sawtooth lattices. They share two peculiar properties: each of their band structures exhibits a flat band with a non-trivial winding number. The difference, however, is that only the Creutz lattice is genuinely topological, owing to a chiral (sub-lattice) symmetry, resulting in a quantized winding number and zero energy edge modes for open boundary conditions. We use mean field and exact density matrix renormalization group in our work. Our three main results are: (a) For both lattice systems, the superconducting weight, $D_s$, is linear in the coupling strength, $U$, for low values of $U$; (b) for small $U$, $D_s$ is proportional to the quantum metric for the Creutz system but not for the sawtooth system because its sublattices are not equivalent; (c) conventional BCS mean field is not appropriate for such systems with inequivalent sublattices. We show that, for a wide range of densities and coupling strengths, these systems are very well described by a full multi-band mean field method where the pairing parameters and the local particle densities on the inequivalent sublattices are variational mean field parameters.
We use unbiased numerical methods to study the onset of pair superfluidity in a system that displays flat bands in the noninteracting regime. This is achieved by using a known example of flat band systems, namely the Creutz lattice, where we investigate the role of local attractive interactions in the $U < 0$ Hubbard model. Going beyond the standard approach used in these systems where weak interactions are considered, we map the superfluid behavior for a wide range of interaction strengths and exhibit a crossover between BCS and tightly bound bosonic fermion pairs. We further contrast these results with a standard two-leg fermionic ladder, showing that the pair correlations, although displaying algebraic decay in both cases, are longer ranged in the Creutz lattice, signifying the robustness of pairing in this system.
Flat bands play an important role in diffraction-free photonics and attract fundamental interest in many-body physics. Here we report the engineering of flat-band localization of collective excited states of atoms in Creutz superradiance lattices with tunable synthetic gauge fields. Magnitudes and phases of the lattice hopping coefficients can be independently tuned to control the state components of the flat band and the Aharonov-Bohm phases. We can selectively excite the flat band and control the flat-band localization with the synthetic gauge field. Our study provides a room-temperature platform for flat bands of atoms and holds promising applications in exploring correlated topological materials.
While multiband systems are usually considered for flat-band physics, here we study one-band models that have flat portions in the dispersion to explore correlation effects in the 2D repulsive Hubbard model in an intermediate coupling regime. The FLEX+DMFT~(the dynamical mean-field theory combined with the fluctuation exchange approximation) is used to show that we have a crossover from ferromagnetic to antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations as the band filling is varied, which triggers a crossover from triplet to singlet pairings with a peculiar filling dependence that is dominated by the size of the flat region in the dispersion. A curious manifestation of the flat part appears as larger numbers of nodal lines associated with pairs extended in real space. We further detect non-Fermi liquid behavior in the momentum distribution function, frequency dependence of the self-energy and spectral function. These indicate correlation physics peculiar to flat-band systems.
We show that when anharmonicity is added to the electron-phonon interaction it facilitates electron pairing in a localized state. Such localized state appears as singlet state of two electrons bound with the traveling local lattice soliton distortion which survives when Coulomb repulsion is included.
Certain lattices with specific geometries have one or more spectral bands that are strictly flat, i.e. the electron energy is independent of the momentum. This can occur robustly irrespective of the specific couplings between the lattices sites due to the lattice symmetry, or it can result from fine-tuned couplings between the lattice sites. While the theoretical picture behind flat electronic bands is well-developed, experimental realization of these lattices has proven challenging. Utilizing scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) and spectroscopy (STS), we manipulate individual vacancies in a chlorine monolayer on Cu(100) to construct various atomically precise 1D lattices with engineered flat bands. We realize experimentally both gapped and gapless flat band systems with single or multiple flat bands. We also demonstrate tuneability of the energy of the flat bands and how they can be switched on and off by breaking and restoring the symmetry of the lattice geometry. The experimental findings are corroborated by tight-binding calculations. Our results constitute the first experimental realizations of engineered flat bands in a 1D solid-state system and pave the way towards the construction of e.g. topological flat band systems and experimental tests of flat-band-assisted superconductivity in a fully controlled system.