Conductivities and Hall coefficients of two-dimensional hard-core bosons (HCB) are calculated using the thermodynamic expansions of Kubo formulas. At temperatures above the superfluid transition, the resistivity rises linearly and is weakly dependent on boson filling. The zeroth-order Hall coefficient diverges toward zero and unit fillings, and reverses its sign at half filling. The correction terms, which are calculated up to fourth (Krylov) orders, do not alter this behavior. The high temperature thermal Hall coefficient is reversed relative to the electric Hall coefficient. We discuss relevance of HCB transport to the metallic state of short coherence length superconductors.
Quantum simulations are quickly becoming an indispensable tool for studying particle transport in correlated lattice models. One of the central topics in the study of transport is bad-metal behavior, characterized by the direct-current resistivity linear in temperature. In the fermionic Hubbard model, optical conductivity has been studied extensively, and a recent optical lattice experiment demonstrated bad-metal behavior in qualitative agreement with theory. Far less is known about transport in the bosonic Hubbard model. We investigate the conductivity in the Bose-Hubbard model and focus on the regime of strong interactions and high temperatures. We use numerically exact calculations for small lattice sizes. At weak tunneling, we find multiple peaks in the optical conductivity that stem from the Hubbard bands present in the many-body spectrum. This feature slowly washes out as the tunneling rate gets stronger. At high temperature, we identify a regime of
T-linear resistivity, as expected. When the interactions are very strong, the leading inverse-temperature coefficient in conductivity is proportional to the tunneling amplitude. As the tunneling becomes stronger, this dependence takes quadratic form. At very strong coupling and half filling, we identify a separate linear resistivity regime at lower temperature, corresponding to the hard-core boson regime. Additionally, we unexpectedly observe that at half filling, in a big part of the phase diagram, conductivity is an increasing function of the coupling constant before it saturates at the hard-core-boson result. We explain this feature based on the analysis of the many-body energy spectrum and the contributions to conductivity of individual eigenstates of the system.
We calculate the Drude weight in the superfluid (SF) and supersolid (SS) phases of the hard-core boson (HCB) model on a square lattice using stochastic series expansion (SSE). We demonstrate from our numerical calculations that the normal phase of HCBs in two dimensions can be an ideal conductor with dissipationless transport. In two dimensions, when the ground state is a SF, the superfluid stiffness drops to zero with a Kosterlitz-Thouless type transition at
TKT. The Drude weight, though is equal to the stiffness below
TKT, surprisingly, stays finite even for a range of temperatures above
TKT indicating the nondissipative transport in the normal state of this system. In contrast to this, in a three-dimensional SF phase, where the superfluid stiffness goes to zero continuously via a second-order phase transition at
Tc, the Drude weight goes to zero at
Tc, as expected. We also calculated the Drude weight in a two-dimensional SS phase, where the charge density wave (CDW) order coexists with superfluidity. For the SS phase we studied, superfluidity is lost via a Kosterlitz-Thouless transition at
TKT and the transition temperature for the CDW order is larger than
TKT. In striped SS phase where the CDW order breaks the rotational symmetry of the lattice, the system behaves like an ideal conductor for a range of temperatures above
TKT along the lattice direction parallel to the stripes, while along the direction perpendicular to the stripes it behaves like an insulator for all
T>TKT. In contrast to this, in the star-SS phase, the Drude weight along both lattice directions goes to zero along with the superfluid stiffness and for
T>TKT we have the finite temperature phase of a CDW insulator.
We derive analytical expressions for the spectral moments of the dynamical response functions of the Hubbard model using the high-temperature series expansion. We consider generic dimension
d as well as the infinite-
d limit, arbitrary electron density
n, and both finite and infinite repulsion
U. We use moment-reconstruction methods to obtain the one-electron spectral function, the self-energy, and the optical conductivity. They are all smooth functions at high temperature and, at large
U, they are featureless with characteristic widths of the order of the lattice hopping parameter
t. In the infinite-
d limit, we compare the series expansion results with accurate numerical renormalization group and interaction expansion quantum Monte Carlo results. We find excellent agreement down to surprisingly low temperatures, throughout most of the bad-metal regime, which applies for $T\ensuremath{\gtrsim}(1\ensuremath{-}n)D$, the Brinkman-Rice scale. The resistivity increases linearly in
T at high temperature without saturation. This results from the
1/T behavior of the compressibility or kinetic energy, which play the role of the effective carrier number. In contrast, the scattering time (or diffusion constant) saturates at high
T. We find that $\ensuremath{\sigma}(n,T)\ensuremath{\approx}(1\ensuremath{-}n)\ensuremath{\sigma}(n=0,T)$ to a very good approximation for all
n, with $\ensuremath{\sigma}(n=0,T)\ensuremath{\propto}t/T$ at high temperatures. The saturation at small
n occurs due to a compensation between the density dependence of the effective number of carriers and that of the scattering time. The
T dependence of the resistivity displays a kneelike feature which signals a crossover to the intermediate-temperature regime where the diffusion constant (or scattering time) starts increasing with decreasing
T. At high temperatures, the thermopower obeys the Heikes formula, while the Wiedemann-Franz law is violated with the Lorenz number vanishing as
1/T2. The relevance of our calculations to experiments probing high-temperature transport in materials with strong electronic correlations or ultracold atomic gases in an optical lattice is briefly discussed.
The breakdown of the celebrated Fermi liquid theory in the strange metal phase is the central enigma of correlated quantum matter. Motivated by recent experiments reporting short-lived carriers, along with the ubiquitous observations of modulated excitations in the phase diagram of cuprates, we propose a phenomenological boson-fermion model for this phase. Along with the fermions, we consider fluctuating bosons emerging from the remnants of a pair density wave as additional current carriers in the strange metal phase. These bosonic excitations are finite-momentum Cooper pairs and thus carry twice the electronic charge, and their net spin can either be zero or one arising from the two spin-
1/2 electrons. We show in a perturbative calculation within Kubo formalism that such a model displays a
TlogT dependence of the resistivity with temperature and manifests the Drude form of the ac conductivity. Furthermore, such bosons are incoherent and hence do not contribute to the Hall conductivity. Finally, the bosons emerging from finite-momentum pairs of spin-triplet symmetry also reproduce the recently observed linear-in-field magnetoresistance in the optimally doped and overdoped cuprates [P. Giraldo-Gallo et al., Science 361, 479 (2018); J. Ayres et al., Nature 595, 661 (2021)].
Magnetotransport of hard-core bosons is studied using an
XXZ quantum spin model representation, appropriately gauged on the torus to allow for an external magnetic field. We find strong lattice effects near half filling. An effective quantum mechanical description of the vortex degrees of freedom is derived. Using semiclassical and numerical analysis we compute the vortex-hopping energy
tV, which at half filling is close to magnitude of the boson hopping energy. The critical quantum melting density of the vortex lattice is estimated at $6.5\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}3}$ vortices per unit cell. The Hall conductance is computed from the Chern numbers of the low-energy eigenstates. At zero temperature, it reverses sign abruptly at half filling. At precisely half filling, all eigenstates are doubly degenerate for any odd number of flux quanta. We prove the exact degeneracies on the torus by constructing an SU(2) algebra of point-group symmetries, associated with the center of vorticity. This result is interpreted as if each vortex carries an internal spin-half degree of freedom, which can manifest itself as a charge density modulation in its core. Our findings suggest interesting experimental implications for vortex motion of cold atoms in optical lattices and magnet transport of short coherence length superconductors.