No Arabic abstract
A major pathway towards understanding complex systems is given by exactly solvable reference systems that contain the essential physics of the system. For the $t-t-U$ Hubbard model, the four-site plaquette is known to have a quantum critical point in the $U-mu$ space where states with electron occupations $N=2, 3, 4$ per plaquette are degenerate [Phys. Rev. B {bf 94}, 125133 (2016)]. We show that such a critical point in the lattice causes an instability in the particle-particle singlet d-wave channel and manifests some of the essential elements of the cuprate superconductivity. For this purpose we design an efficient superperturbation theory -- based on the dual fermion approach -- with the critical plaquette as the reference system. Thus, the perturbation theory already contains the relevant d-wave fluctuations from the beginning via the two-particle correlations of the plaquette. We find that d-wave superconductivity remains a leading instability channel under reasonably broad range of parameters. The next-nearest-neighbour hopping $t$ is shown to play a crucial role in a formation of strongly bound electronic bipolarons whose coherence at lower temperature results in superconductivity. The physics of the pseudogap within the developed picture is also discussed.
A systematic diagrammatic expansion for Gutzwiller-wave functions (DE-GWF) is formulated and used for the description of superconducting (SC) ground state in the two-dimensional Hubbard model with electron-transfer amplitudes t (and t) between nearest (and next-nearest) neighbors. The method is numerically very efficient and allows for a detailed analysis of the phase diagram as a function of all relevant parameters (U, delta, t) and a determination of the kinetic-energy driven pairing region. SC states appear only for substantial interactions, U/t > 3, and for not too large hole doping, delta < 0.32 for t = 0.25 t; this upper critical doping value agrees well with experiment for the cuprate high-temperature superconductors. We also obtain other important features of the SC state: (i) the SC gap at the Fermi surface resembles $d_{x^2-y^2}$-wave only around the optimal doping and the corrections to this state are shown to arise from the longer range of the pairing; (ii) the nodal Fermi velocity is almost constant as a function of doping and agrees quantitatively with the experimental results; (iii) the SC transition is driven by the kinetic-energy lowering for low doping and strong interactions.
We show that, at weak to intermediate coupling, antiferromagnetic fluctuations enhance d-wave pairing correlations until, as one moves closer to half-filling, the antiferromagnetically-induced pseudogap begins to suppress the tendency to superconductivity. The accuracy of our approach is gauged by detailed comparisons with Quantum Monte Carlo simulations. The negative pressure dependence of Tc and the existence of photoemission hot spots in electron-doped cuprate superconductors find their natural explanation within this approach.
In strongly-correlated systems the electronic properties at the Fermi energy (EF) are intertwined with those at high energy scales. One of the pivotal challenges in the field of high-temperature superconductivity (HTSC) is to understand whether and how the high energy scale physics associated with Mott-like excitations (|E-E$_{F}$|>1 eV) is involved in the condensate formation. Here we show the interplay between the many-body high-energy CuO2 excitations at 1.5 and 2 eV and the onset of HTSC. This is revealed by a novel optical pump supercontinuum-probe technique, which provides access to the dynamics of the dielectric function in Bi$_2$Sr$_2$Ca$_{0.92}$Y$_{0.08}$Cu$_2$O$_{8+{delta}}$ over an extended energy range, after the photoinduced suppression of the superconducting pairing. These results unveil an unconventional mechanism at the base of HTSC both below and above the optimal hole concentration required to attain the maximum critical temperature (T$_c$).
A number of spectacular experimental anomaliescite{li-2007,fujita-2005} have recently been discovered in certain cuprates, notably {LBCO} and {LNSCO}, which exhibit unidirectional spin and charge order (known as ``stripe order). We have recently proposed to interpret these observations as evidence for a novel ``striped superconducting state, in which the superconducting order parameter is modulated in space, such that its average is precisely zero. Here, we show that thermal melting of the striped superconducting state can lead to a number of unusual phases, of which the most novel is a charge $4e$ superconducting state, with a corresponding fractional flux quantum $hc/4e$. These are never-before observed states of matter, and ones, moreover, that cannot arise from the conventional Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) mechanism. Thus, direct confirmation of their existence, even in a small subset of the cuprates, could have much broader implications for our understanding of high temperature superconductivity. We propose experiments to observe fractional flux quantization, which thereby could confirm the existence of these states.
We present a new method to treat the two-dimensional (2D) Hubbard model for parameter regimes which are relevant for the physics of the high-$T_c$ superconducting cuprates. Unlike previous attempts to attack this problem, our new approach takes into account all fluctuations in different channels on equal footing and is able to treat reasonable large lattice sizes up to 32x32. This is achieved by the following three-step procedure: (i) We transform the original problem to a new representation (dual fermions) in which all purely local correlation effects from the dynamical mean field theory are already considered in the bare propagator and bare interaction of the new problem. (ii) The strong $1/(i u)^2$ decay of the bare propagator allows us to integrate out all higher Matsubara frequencies besides the lowest using low order diagrams. The new effective action depends only on the two lowest Matsubara frequencies which allows us to, (iii) apply the two-particle self-consistent parquet formalism, which takes into account the competition between different low-energy bosonic modes in an unbiased way, on much finer momentum grids than usual. In this way, we were able to map out the phase diagram of the 2D Hubbard model as a function of temperature and doping. Consistently with the experimental evidence for hole-doped cuprates and previous dynamical cluster approximation calculations, we find an antiferromagnetic region at low-doping and a superconducting dome at higher doping. Our results also support the role of the van Hove singularity as an important ingredient for the high value of $T_c$ at optimal doping. At small doping, the destruction of antiferromagnetism is accompanied by an increase of charge fluctuations supporting the scenario of a phase separated state driven by quantum critical fluctuations.