A d-wave superconducting ground state for a doped Mott insulator is obtained. It is distinguished from a Gutzwiller-projected Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) superconductor by an explicit separation of Cooper pairing and resonating valence bond (RVB) pairing. Such a state satisfies the precise sign structure of the t–J model, just as a BCS state satisfies the Fermi–Dirac statistics. This new class of wavefunctions can be intrinsically characterized and effectively manipulated by electron fractionalization with neutral spinons and 'backflow' spinons forming a two-component RVB structure. While the former spinon is bosonic, originating from the superexchange correlation, the latter spinon is found to be fermionic, accompanying the hopping of bosonic holons. The low-lying emergent gauge fields associated with such a specific fractionalization are of mutual Chern–Simons type. Corresponding to this superconducting ground state, three types of elementary excitations are identified. Among them a Bogoliubov nodal quasiparticle is conventional, while the other two are neutral excitations of non-BCS type that play crucial roles in higher-energy/temperature regimes. Their unique experimental implications for the cuprates are briefly discussed.
A d-wave superconducting ground state for a doped Mott insulator is obtained. It is distinguished from a Gutzwiller-projected Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) superconductor by an explicit separation of Cooper pairing and resonating valence bond (RVB) pairing. Such a state satisfies the precise sign structure of the t–J model, just as a BCS state satisfies the Fermi–Dirac statistics. This new class of wavefunctions can be intrinsically characterized and effectively manipulated by electron fractionalization with neutral spinons and 'backflow' spinons forming a two-component RVB structure. While the former spinon is bosonic, originating from the superexchange correlation, the latter spinon is found to be fermionic, accompanying the hopping of bosonic holons. The low-lying emergent gauge fields associated with such a specific fractionalization are of mutual Chern–Simons type. Corresponding to this superconducting ground state, three types of elementary excitations are identified. Among them a Bogoliubov nodal quasiparticle is conventional, while the other two are neutral excitations of non-BCS type that play crucial roles in higher-energy/temperature regimes. Their unique experimental implications for the cuprates are briefly discussed.
Superconductivity is usually described in the framework of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) wavefunction, which even includes the resonating-valence-bond (RVB) wavefunction proposed for the high-temperature superconductivity in the cuprate. A natural question is if any fundamental physics could be possibly missed by applying such a scheme to strongly correlated systems. Here we study the pairing wavefunction of two holes injected into a Mott insulator/antiferromagnet in a two-leg ladder using variational Monte Carlo approach. By comparing with density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) calculation, we show that a conventional BCS or RVB pairing of the doped holes makes qualitatively wrong predictions and is incompatible with the fundamental pairing force in the $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}J$ model, which is kinetic-energy driven by nature. By contrast, a non-BCS-like wavefunction incorporating such novel effect will result in a substantially enhanced pairing strength and improved ground state energy as compared to the DMRG results. We argue that the non-BCS form of such a new ground state wavefunction is essential to describe a doped Mott antiferromagnet at finite doping.
We propose a class of ground states for doped Mott insulators in the electron second quantization representation. They are obtained from a bosonic resonating valence bond (RVB) theory of the $t\text{\penalty1000-\hskip0pt}J$ model. At half filling, the ground state describes spin correlations of the S=1∕2 Heisenberg model very accurately. Its spin degrees of freedom are characterized by RVB pairing of spins, the size of which decreases continuously as holes are doped into the system. Charge degrees of freedom emerge upon doping and are described by twisted holes in the RVB background. We show that the twisted holes exhibit an off diagonal long range order (ODLRO) in the pseudogap ground state, which has a finite pairing amplitude, but is short of phase coherence. Unpaired spins in such a pseudogap ground state behave as free vortices, preventing superconducting phase coherence. The existence of nodal quasiparticles is also ensured by such a hidden ODLRO in the ground state, which is non-Fermi liquidlike in the absence of superconducting phase coherence. Two distinct types of spin excitations can also be constructed. The superconducting instability of the pseudogap ground state is discussed and a d-wave superconducting ground state is obtained. This class of pseudogap and superconducting ground states unifies antiferromagnetism, pseudogap, superconductivity, and Mott physics into a new state of matter.
We examine the dynamical magnetic response in a two-component resonating-valence-bond (RVB) description of the doped Mott insulator. The half-filled antiferromagnetic phase described by the Schwinger-boson mean-field theory will evolve into a bosonic-RVB state in the superconducting phase upon doping, where the doped holes introduce another fermionic itinerant spinon which forms a BCS-like RVB order. The spin excitations are thus composed of a resonance-like mode from the former and a weak dispersive mode from the itinerant component at the mean-field level. These two-component spinons are shown to give rise to an hourglasslike spin excitation at the random-phase approximation level via an antiferromagnetic coupling between the two modes, which provides an unconventional explanation of the experimental observations in the cuprate. In particular, we also discuss an instability towards an incommensurate magnetic order in this theoretical framework. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Cooper pairing instability in a Fermi liquid is well understood by the BCS theory, but pairing mechanism for doped Mott insulators still remains elusive. Previously it has been shown by density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) method that a single doped hole is always self-localized due to the quantum destructive interference of the phase string signs hidden in the t-J ladders. Here we report a DMRG investigation of hole binding in the same model, where a novel pairing-glue scheme beyond the BCS realm is discovered. Specifically, we show that, in addition to spin pairing due to superexchange interaction, the strong frustration of the phase string signs on the kinetic energy gets effectively removed by pairing the charges, which results in strong binding of two holes. By contrast, if the phase string signs are "switched off" artificially, the pairing strength diminishes significantly even if the superexchange coupling remains the same. In the latter, unpaired holes behave like coherent quasiparticles with pairing drastically weakened, whose sole origin may be attributed to the resonating-valence-bond (RVB) pairing of spins. Such non-BCS pairing mechanism is therefore beyond the RVB picture and may shed important light on the high-T(c) cuprate superconductors.
Resonating valence bond states in a doped Mott insulator was proposed to explain superconductivity in cuprates in January 1987 by Anderson. A challenging task then was proving existence of this unconventional mechanism and a wealth of possibilities, with a rigor acceptable in standard condensed matter physics, in a microscopic theory and develop suitable many body techniques. Shortly, a paper by Anderson, Zou and us (BZA) undertook this task and initiated a program. Three key papers that followed, shortly, essentially completed the program, as far as superconductivity is concerned,i) a gauge theory approach by Anderson and us, that went beyond mean field theory ii) Kotliar’s d -wave solution in BZA theory iii) improvement of a renormalized Hamiltonian in BZA theory, using a Gutzwiller approximation by Zhang, Gros, Rice and Shiba. In this article I shall focus on the merits of BZA and gauge theory papers. They turned out to be a foundation for subsequent developments dealing with more aspects that were unconventional - d -wave order parameter with nodal Bogoliubov quasi particles, Affleck-Marston’s π-flux condensed spin liquid phase, unconventional spin-1 collective mode at (π, π), and other fascinating developments. Kivelson, Rokhsar and Sethna’s idea of holons and their bose condensation found expression in the slave boson formalism and lead to results similar to BZA program. At optimal doping, correlated electrons acquire sufficient fermi sea character, at the same time retain enough superexchange inherited from a Mott insulator parentage, ending in a BCS like situation with superexchange as a glue! Not surprisingly, mean field theory works well at optimal doping, even quantitatively. Further, t-J model is a minimal model only around optimal doping, where RVB superconductivity is also at its best.
In this work, we present a topological characterization of superconductivity in a prototype electron fractionalization model for doped Mott insulators. In this model, spinons and holons are coupled via the mutual Chern-Simons gauge fields. We obtain a low-lying effective description of the collective current fluctuations by integrating out the matter fields, which replaces the conventional Ginzburg-Landau action to describe the generalized rigidity of superconductivity. The superconducting phase coherence is essentially characterized by a topological order parameter related to a Gaussian linking number, and an experiment is proposed to probe this topological property. We further show that a gauge-neutral fermionic mode can naturally emerge in this model, which behaves like a Bogoliubov quasiparticle.