No Arabic abstract
This work presents a method of grouping the electron spinors and the acoustic phonon modes of polar crystals such as metal oxides into an SU(2) gauge theory. The gauge charge is the electron spin, which is assumed to couple to the transverse acoustic phonons on the basis of spin ordering phenomena in crystals such as V$_{2}$O$_{3}$ and VO$_{2}$, while the longitudinal mode is neutral. A generalization the Peierls mechanism is presented based on the discrete gauge invariance of crystals and the corresponding Ward-Takahashi identity. The introduction of a band index violates the Ward-Takahashi identity for interband transitions resulting in a longitudinal component appearing in the upper phonon band. Thus both the spinors and the vector bosons acquire mass and a crystal with an electronic band gap and optical phonon modes results. In the limit that the coupling of bosons charged under the SU(2) gauge group goes to zero, breaking the electron U(1) symmetry recovers the BCS mechanism. In the limit that the neutral boson decouples, a Cooper instability mediated by spin-wave exchange results from symmetry breaking, i.e. unconventional superconductivity mediated by magnetic interactions.
Concise and powerful mathematical descriptions of the interplay of spin and charge degrees of degrees of freedom with crystal lattice fluctuations are of extreme importance in materials science. Such descriptions allow structured approaches to optimizing material efficiencies resulting in considerable resource savings and higher performance devices. In this work, by re-imagining the the Gell-Mann matrices as 3$times$3 linear transformations acting on a column vector of position states, an SU(3) theory of the interplay between lattice fluctuations and strong electron correlations in 2-dimensional hexagonal materials such as graphene is formulated.
Understanding the physics of strongly correlated electronic systems has been a central issue in condensed matter physics for decades. In transition metal oxides, strong correlations characteristic of narrow $d$ bands is at the origin of such remarkable properties as the Mott gap opening, enhanced effective mass, and anomalous vibronic coupling, to mention a few. SrVO$_3$, with V$^{4+}$ in a $3d^1$ electronic configuration is the simplest example of a 3D correlated metallic electronic system. Here, we focus on the observation of a (roughly) quadratic temperature dependence of the inverse electron mobility of this seemingly simple system, which is an intriguing property shared by other metallic oxides. The systematic analysis of electronic transport in SrVO$_3$ thin films discloses the limitations of the simplest picture of e-e correlations in a Fermi liquid; instead, we show that the quasi-2D topology of the Fermi surface and a strong electron-phonon coupling, contributing to dress carriers with a phonon cloud, play a pivotal role on the reported electron spectroscopic, optical, thermodynamic and transport data. The picture that emerges is not restricted to SrVO$_3$ but can be shared with other $3d$ and $4d$ metallic oxides.
While many physical properties of graphene can be understood qualitatively on the basis of bare Dirac bands, there is specific evidence that electron-electron (EE) and electron-phonon (EP) interactions can also play an important role. We discuss strategies for extracting separate images of the EE and EP interactions as they present themselves in the electron spectral density and related self-energies. While for momentum, $k$, equal to its Fermi value, $k_F$, a composite structure is obtained which can be difficult to separate into its two constituent parts, at smaller values of $k$ the spectral function shows distinct incoherent sidebands on the left and right of the main quasiparticle line. These image respectively the EE and EP interactions, each being most prominent in its own energy window. We employ a maximum entropy inversion technique on the self energy to reveal the electron-phonon spectral density separate from the excitation spectrum due to coulomb correlations. Our calculations show that this technique can provide important new insights into inelastic scattering processes in graphene.
We employ time-resolved resonant x-ray diffraction to study the melting of charge order and the associated insulator-metal transition in the doped manganite Pr$_{0.5}$Ca$_{0.5}$MnO$_3$ after resonant excitation of a high-frequency infrared-active lattice mode. We find that the charge order reduces promptly and highly nonlinearly as function of excitation fluence. Density functional theory calculations suggest that direct anharmonic coupling between the excited lattice mode and the electronic structure drive these dynamics, highlighting a new avenue of nonlinear phonon control.
An essential ingredient in many model Hamiltonians, such as the Hubbard model, is the effective electron-electron interaction $U$, which enters as matrix elements in some localized basis. These matrix elements provide the necessary information in the model, but the localized basis is incomplete for describing $U$. We present a systematic scheme for computing the manifestly basis-independent dynamical interaction in position representation, $U({bf r},{bf r};omega)$, and its Fourier transform to time domain, $U({bf r},{bf r};tau)$. These functions can serve as an unbiased tool for the construction of model Hamiltonians. For illustration we apply the scheme within the constrained random-phase approximation to the cuprate parent compounds La$_2$CuO$_4$ and HgBa$_2$CuO$_4$ within the commonly used 1- and 3-band models, and to non-superconducting SrVO$_{3}$ within the $t_{2g}$ model. Our method is used to investigate the shape and strength of screening channels in the compounds. We show that the O 2$p_{x,y}-$Cu 3$d_{x^2-y^2}$ screening gives rise to regions with strong attractive static interaction in the minimal (1-band) model in both cuprates. On the other hand, in the minimal ($t_{2g}$) model of SrVO$_3$ only regions with a minute attractive interaction are found. The temporal interaction exhibits generic damped oscillations in all compounds, and its time-integral is shown to be the potential caused by inserting a frozen point charge at $tau=0$. When studying the latter within the three-band model for the cuprates, short time intervals are found to produce a negative potential.