No Arabic abstract
By employing unbiased numerical methods, we show that pulse irradiation can induce unconventional superconductivity even in the Mott insulator of the Hubbard model. The superconductivity found here in the photoexcited state is due to the $eta$-pairing mechanism, characterized by staggered pair-density-wave oscillations in the off-diagonal long-range correlation, and is absent in the ground-state phase diagram; i.e., it is induced neither by a change of the effective interaction of the Hubbard model nor by simple photocarrier doping. Because of the selection rule, we show that the nonlinear optical response is essential to increase the number of $eta$ pairs and thus enhance the superconducting correlation in the photoexcited state. Our finding demonstrates that nonequilibrium many-body dynamics is an alternative pathway to access a new exotic quantum state that is absent in the ground-state phase diagram and also provides an alternative mechanism for enhancing superconductivity.
The previous theoretical study has shown that pulse irradiation to the Mott insulating state in the Hubbard model can induce the enhancement of superconducting correlation due to the generation of $eta$ pairs. Here, we show that the same mechanism can be applied to the Kondo lattice model, an effective model for heavy electron systems, by demonstrating that the pulse irradiation indeed enhances the $eta$-pairing correlation. As in the case of the Hubbard model, the non-linear optical process is essential to increase the number of photoinduced $eta$ pairs and thus the enhancement of the superconducting correlation. We also find the diffusive behavior of the spin dynamics after the pulse irradiation, suggesting that the increase of the number of $eta$ pairs leads to the decoupling between the conduction band and the localized spins in the Kondo lattice model, which is inseparably related to the photodoping effect.
The two-dimensional attractive Hubbard model is studied in the weak to intermediate coupling regime by employing a non-perturbative approach. It is first shown that this approach is in quantitative agreement with Monte Carlo calculations for both single-particle and two-particle quantities. Both the density of states and the single-particle spectral weight show a pseudogap at the Fermi energy below some characteristic temperature T*, also in good agreement with quantum Monte Carlo calculations. The pseudogap is caused by critical pairing fluctuations in the low-temperature renormalized classical regime $omega < T$ of the two-dimensional system. With increasing temperature the spectral weight fills in the pseudogap instead of closing it and the pseudogap appears earlier in the density of states than in the spectral function. Small temperature changes around T* can modify the spectral weight over frequency scales much larger than temperature. Several qualitative results for the s-wave case should remain true for d-wave superconductors.
We show that optical excitation of the Mott insulating phase of the one-dimensional Hubbard model can create a state possessing two of the hallmarks of superconductivity: a nonvanishing charge stiffness and long-ranged pairing correlation. By employing the exact diagonalization method, we find that the superposition of the $eta$-pairing eigenstates induced by the optical pump exhibits a nonvanishing charge stiffness and a pairing correlation that decays very slowly with system size in sharp contrast to the behavior of an ensemble of thermally excited eigenstates, which has a vanishing charge stiffness and no long-ranged pairing correlations. We show that the charge stiffness is indeed directly associated with the $eta$-pairing correlation in the Hubbard model. Our finding demonstrates that optical pumping can actually lead to superconducting-like properties on the basis of the $eta$-pairing states.
We rigorously prove that an extended Hubbard model with attraction in two dimensions has an unconventional pairing ground state for any electron filling. The anisotropic spin-0 or anisotropic spin-1 pairing symmetry is realized, depending on a phase parameter characterizing the type of local attractive interactions. In both cases the ground state is unique. It is also shown that in a special case, where there are no electron hopping terms, the ground state has Ising-type Neel order at half-filling, when on-site repulsion is furthermore added. Physical applications are mentioned.
We numerically prove photoinduced $eta$-pairing in a half-filled fermionic Hubbard chain at both zero and finite temperature. The result, obtained by combining the matrix-product-state based infinite time-evolving block decimation technique and the purification method, applies to the thermodynamic limit. Exciting the Mott insulator by a laser electric field docked on via the Peierls phase, we track the time-evolution of the correlated many-body system and determine the optimal parameter set for which the nonlocal part of the $eta$-pair correlation function becomes dominant during the laser pump at zero and low temperatures. These correlations vanish at higher temperatures and long times after pulse irradiation. In the high laser frequency strong Coulomb coupling regime we observe a remnant enhancement of the Brillouin-zone boundary pair-correlation function also at high temperatures, if the Hubbard interaction is about a multiple of the laser frequency, which can be attributed to an enhanced double occupancy in the virtual Floquet state.