No Arabic abstract
We review application of the SU(4) model of strongly-correlated electrons to cuprate and iron-based superconductors. A minimal self-consistent generalization of BCS theory to incorporate antiferromagnetism on an equal footing with pairing and strong Coulomb repulsion is found to account systematically for the major features of high-temperature superconductivity, with microscopic details of the parent compounds entering only parametrically. This provides a systematic procedure to separate essential from peripheral, suggesting that many features exhibited by the high-$Ttsub c$ data set are of interest in their own right but are not central to the superconducting mechanism. More generally, we propose that the surprisingly broad range of conventional and unconventional superconducting and superfluid behavior observed across many fields of physics results from the systematic appearance of similar algebraic structures for the emergent effective Hamiltonians, even though the microscopic Hamiltonians of the corresponding parent states may differ radically from each other.
A microscopic theory of the electronic spectrum and of superconductivity within the t-J model on the honeycomb lattice is developed. We derive the equations for the normal and anomalous Green functions in terms of the Hubbard operators by applying the projection technique. Superconducting pairing of d + id-type mediated by the antiferromagnetic exchange is found. The superconducting Tc as a function of hole doping exhibits a two-peak structure related to the van Hove singularities of the density of states for the two-band t-J model. At half-filling and for large enough values of the exchange coupling, gapless superconductivity may occur. For small doping the coexistence of antiferromagnetic order and superconductivity is suggested. It is shown that the s-wave pairing is prohibited, since it violates the constraint of no-double-occupancy.
We present the results of numerical studies of superconductivity and antiferromagnetism in a strongly correlated electron system. To do this we construct a Hubbard model on a lattice of self-consistently embedded multi-site clusters by means of a dynamical mean-field theory in which intra-cluster dynamics is treated essentially exactly. We show that a class of characteristic features which have been seen in the excitation spectra of high-$T_{c}$ cuprates (e.g., pseudogap and the spin-flip resonance), as well as their interplay with the onset of a pairing correlations, can be captured within a dynamical mean-field theory in which short-wavelength dynamics are rigorously treated. Thus we infer that the observation of the neutron scattering resonance in the superconducting state of the cuprate superconductors does not appear to be directly tied to their quasi-2D character. Although our approach is defined strictly in terms of fermion degrees of freedom, we show that we can readily identify the emergence of effective low energy bosonic degrees of freedom in the presence of a well-defined broken symmetry phase as long as their dynamics are dominated by short-range, short-wavelength fluctuations. Our results reveal that the dynamics of staggered spin degrees of freedom builds up coherence and a resonance-like sharp feature emerges as pairing correlations set in. Under conditions of superconducting broken symmetry our approach thus extends static BCS mean field theory to provide an exact treatment of quantum fluctuations of the BCS order parameter.
We solve by Dynamical Mean Field Theory a toy-model which has a phase diagram strikingly similar to that of high $T_c$ superconductors: a bell-shaped superconducting region adjacent the Mott insulator and a normal phase that evolves from a conventional Fermi liquid to a pseudogapped semi-metal as the Mott transition is approached. Guided by the physics of the impurity model that is self-consistently solved within Dynamical Mean Field Theory, we introduce an analytical ansatz to model the dynamical behavior across the various phases which fits very accurately the numerical data. The ansatz is based on the assumption that the wave-function renormalization, that is very severe especially in the pseudogap phase close to the Mott transition, is perfectly canceled by the vertex corrections in the Cooper pairing channel.A remarkable outcome is that a superconducting state can develop even from a pseudogapped normal state, in which there are no low-energy quasiparticles. The overall physical scenario that emerges, although unraveled in a specific model and in an infinite-coordination Bethe lattice, can be interpreted in terms of so general arguments to suggest that it can be realized in other correlated systems.
We present a novel route for attaining unconventional superconductivity (SC) in a strongly correlated system without doping. In a simple model of a correlated band insulator (BI) at half-filling we demonstrate, based on a generalization of the projected wavefunctions method, that SC emerges when e-e interactions and the bare band-gap are both much larger than the kinetic energy, provided the system has sufficient frustration against the magnetic order. As the interactions are tuned, SC appears sandwiched between the correlated BI followed by a paramagnetic metal on one side, and a ferrimagnetic metal, antiferromagnetic (AF) half-metal, and AF Mott insulator phases on the other side.
Recent experiments in the cuprates have seen evidence of a transient superconducting state upon optical excitation polarized along the c-axis [R. Mankowsky et al., Nature 516, 71 (2014)]. Motivated by these experiments we propose an extension of the single-layer $t-J-V$ model of cuprates to three dimensions in order to study the effects of inter-plane tunneling on the competition between superconductivity and bond density wave order. We find that an optical pump can suppress the charge order and simultaneously enhance superconductivity, due to the inherent competition between the two. We also provide an intuitive picture of the physical mechanism underlying this effect. Furthermore, based on a simple Floquet theory we estimate the magnitude of the enhancement.