Twisted bilayer graphene exhibits a panoply of many-body phenomena that are intimately tied to the appearance of narrow and well isolated electronic bands near magic-angle. The microscopic ingredients that are responsible for the complex experimental
phenomenology include electron-electron (phonon) interactions and non-trivial Bloch wavefunctions associated with the narrow bands. Inspired by recent experiments, we focus here on an interplay of two independent interaction-induced phenomena on superconductivity. We analyze the combined effects of Coulomb interaction driven band-flattening and phonon-mediated attraction due to the exchange of multiple electron-phonon umklapp processes, as a function of filling and twist angle. The former leads to a filling-dependent enhancement of the renormalized density of states, which contributes to a robust increase in the tendency towards pairing in a range of angles near magic-angle. In addition, the minimal spatial extent associated with the Wannier functions develops a non-trivial enhancement as a result of these many-body renormalizations, which can further contribute towards stabilizing the superconducting state over a wider range of fillings and twist-angles.
Identifying the microscopic mechanism for superconductivity in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG) is an outstanding open problem. While MATBG exhibits a rich phase-diagram, driven partly by the strong interactions relative to the electronic
bandwidth, its single-particle properties are unique and likely play an important role in some of the phenomenological complexity. Some of the salient features include an electronic bandwidth smaller than the characteristic phonon bandwidth and a non-trivial structure of the underlying Bloch wavefunctions. We perform a theoretical study of the cooperative effects due to phonons and plasmons on pairing in order to disentangle the distinct role played by these modes on superconductivity. We consider a variant of MATBG with an enlarged number of fermion flavors, $N gg 1$, where the study of pairing instabilities reduces to the conventional (weak-coupling) Eliashberg framework. In particular, we show that certain umklapp processes involving mini-optical phonon modes, which arise physically as a result of the folding of the original acoustic branch of graphene due to the moire superlattice structure, contribute significantly towards enhancing pairing. We also investigate the role played by the dynamics of the screened Coulomb interaction on pairing, which leads to an enhancement in a narrow window of fillings, and study the effect of external screening due to a metallic gate on superconductivity. At strong coupling the dynamical pairing interaction leaves a spectral mark in the single particle tunneling density of states. We thus predict such features will appear at specific frequencies of the umklapp phonons corresponding to the sound velocity of graphene times an integer multiple of the Brillouin zone size.
We study a two-dimensional model of an isolated narrow topological band at partial filling with local attractive interactions. Numerically exact quantum Monte Carlo calculations show that the ground state is a superconductor with a critical temperatu
re that scales nearly linearly with the interaction strength. We also find a broad pseudogap regime at temperatures above the superconducting phase that exhibits strong pairing fluctuations and a tendency towards electronic phase separation; introducing a small nearest neighbor attraction suppresses superconductivity entirely and results in phase separation. We discuss the possible relevance of superconductivity in this unusual regime to the physics of flat band moir{e} materials, and as a route to designing higher temperature superconductors.
We construct examples of translationally invariant solvable models of strongly-correlated metals, composed of lattices of Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev dots with identical local interactions. These models display crossovers as a function of temperature into regi
mes with local quantum criticality and marginal-Fermi liquid behavior. In the marginal Fermi liquid regime, the dc resistivity increases linearly with temperature over a broad range of temperatures. By generalizing the form of interactions, we also construct examples of non-Fermi liquids with critical Fermi-surfaces. The self energy has a singular frequency dependence, but lacks momentum dependence, reminiscent of a dynamical mean field theory-like behavior but in dimensions $d<infty$. In the low temperature and strong-coupling limit, a heavy Fermi liquid is formed. The critical Fermi-surface in the non-Fermi liquid regime gives rise to quantum oscillations in the magnetization as a function of an external magnetic field in the absence of quasiparticle excitations. We discuss the implications of these results for local quantum criticality and for fundamental bounds on relaxation rates. Drawing on the lessons from these models, we formulate conjectures on coarse grained descriptions of a class of intermediate scale non-fermi liquid behavior in generic correlated metals.
We present here the design of a sensitive Compact Faraday-modulator (CFM) based optical magnetometer for imaging the distribution of weak local magnetic fields inside hysteretic magnetic materials. The system developed has a root mean square (rms) no
ise level of 50 mG.Hz-1/2 at a full frame rate of 1 frame per second with each frame being of size 512 x 512 pixels. By measuring the local magnetic field distribution in different superconducting samples we show that our magnetometer provides an order of magnitude improvement in the signal to noise (S/N) ratio at low fields as compared to ordinary magneto-optical imaging technique. Moreover, it provides the required sensitivity for imaging the weak magnetization response near a superconducting transition where a number of other imaging techniques are practically unviable. An advantage of our CFM design is that it can be scaled in size to fit into situations with tight space constraints.
