Fully occupied or unoccupied bands in a solid are often considered inert and irrelevant to a materials low-energy properties. But the discovery of enhanced superconductivity in heavily electron-doped FeSe-derived superconductors poses questions about
the possible role of incipient bands (those laying close to but not crossing the Fermi level) in pairing. To answer this question, researchers have studied pairing correlations in the bilayer Hubbard model, which has an incipient band for large interlayer hopping $t_perp$, using many-body perturbation theory and variational methods. They have generally found that superconductivity is enhanced as one of the bands approaches the Liftshiz transition and even when it becomes incipient. Here, we address this question using the nonperturbative quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) dynamical cluster approximation (DCA) to study the bilayer Hubbard models pairing correlations. We find that the model has robust $s_pm$ pairing correlations in the large $t_perp$ limit, which can become stronger as one band is made incipient. While this behavior is linked to changes in the effective interaction, we further find that it is counteracted by a suppression of the intrinsic pair-field susceptibility and does not translate to an increased $T_c$. Our results demonstrate that the highest achievable transition temperatures in the bilayer Hubbard model occur when the system has two bands crossing the Fermi level.
The high-temperature superconducting cuprates are governed by intertwined spin, charge, and superconducting orders. While various state-of-the-art numerical methods have demonstrated that these phases also manifest themselves in doped Hubbard models,
they differ on which is the actual ground state. Finite cluster methods typically indicate that stripe order dominates while embedded quantum cluster methods, which access the thermodynamic limit by treating long-range correlations with a dynamical mean field, conclude that superconductivity does. Here, we report the observation of fluctuating spin and charge stripes in the doped single-band Hubbard model using a quantum Monte Carlo dynamical cluster approximation (DCA) method. By resolving both the fluctuating spin and charge orders using DCA, we demonstrate for the first time that they survive in the doped Hubbard model in the thermodynamic limit. This discovery also provides a new opportunity to study the influence of fluctuating stripe correlations on the models pairing correlations within a unified numerical framework.
We show that, by an appropriate choice of auxiliary fields and exact integration of the phonon degrees of freedom, it is possible to define a sign-free path integral for the so called Hubbard-Holstein model at half-filling. We use a statistical metho
d, based on an accelerated and efficient Langevin dynamics, for evaluating all relevant correlation functions of the model. Preliminary calculations at $U/t=4$ and $U/t=1$, for $omega_0/t=1$, indicate a quite extended region around $U simeq {g^2 over omega_0}$ without either antiferromagnetic or charge-density-wave orders, separating two quantum critical points at zero temperature. The elimination of the sign problem in a model without explicit particle-hole symmetry may open new perspectives for strongly correlated models, even away from the purely attractive or particle-hole symmetric cases.
By using variational Monte Carlo and auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo methods, we perform an accurate finite-size scaling of the $s$-wave superconducting order parameter and the pairing correlations for the negative-$U$ Hubbard model at zero tempe
rature in the square lattice. We show that the twist-averaged boundary conditions (TABCs) are extremely important to control finite-size effects and to achieve smooth and accurate extrapolations to the thermodynamic limit. We also show that TABCs is much more efficient in the grand-canonical ensemble rather than in the standard canonical ensemble with fixed number of electrons. The superconducting order parameter as a function of the doping is presented for several values of $|U|/t$ and is found to be significantly smaller than the mean-field BCS estimate already for moderate couplings. This reduction is understood by a variational ansatz able to describe the low-energy behaviour of the superconducting phase, by means of a suitably chosen Jastrow factor including long-range density-density correlations.
By using variational wave functions and quantum Monte Carlo techniques, we investigate the interplay between electron-electron and electron-phonon interactions in the two-dimensional Hubbard-Holstein model. Here, the ground-state phase diagram is tri
ggered by several energy scales, i.e., the electron hopping $t$, the on-site electron-electron interaction $U$, the phonon energy $omega_0$, and the electron-phonon coupling $g$. At half filling, the ground state is an antiferromagnetic insulator for $U gtrsim 2g^2/omega_0$, while it is a charge-density-wave (or bi-polaronic) insulator for $U lesssim 2g^2/omega_0$. In addition to these phases, we find a superconducting phase that intrudes between them. For $omega_0/t=1$, superconductivity emerges when both $U/t$ and $2g^2/tomega_0$ are small; then, by increasing the value of the phonon energy $omega_0$, it extends along the transition line between antiferromagnetic and charge-density-wave insulators. Away from half filling, phase separation occurs when doping the charge-density-wave insulator, while a uniform (superconducting) ground state is found when doping the superconducting phase. In the analysis of finite-size effects, it is extremely important to average over twisted boundary conditions, especially in the weak-coupling limit and in the doped case.
