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arXiv:1206.4064 · Physical Review A

Superfluidity of Dirac fermions in a tunable honeycomb lattice: Cooper pairing, collective modes, and critical currents

Shunji Tsuchiya, R. Ganesh, Arun Paramekanti

Published Sep 4, 2012• 10 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Motivated by recent experiments on atomic Dirac fermions in a tunable honeycomb optical lattice, we study the attractive Hubbard model of superfluidity in the anisotropic honeycomb lattice. At weak coupling, we find that the maximum mean-field pairing transition temperature, as a function of density and interaction strength, occurs for the case with isotropic hopping amplitudes. In this isotropic case, we go beyond mean-field theory and study collective fluctuations, treating both pairing and density fluctuations for interaction strengths ranging from weak to strong coupling. We find evidence for a sharp sound mode, together with a well-defined Leggett mode over a wide region of the phase diagram. We also calculate the superfluid order parameter and collective modes in the presence of nonzero superfluid flow. The flow-induced softening of these collective modes leads to dynamical instabilities involving stripelike density modulations as well as a Leggett-mode instability associated with the natural sublattice symmetry-breaking charge-ordered state on the honeycomb lattice. The latter provides a nontrivial test for the experimental realization of the one-band Hubbard model. We delineate regimes of the phase diagram where the critical current is limited by depairing or by such collective instabilities, and discuss experimental implications of our results.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.86.033604

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Motivated by recent experiments on atomic Dirac fermions in a tunable honeycomb optical lattice, we study the attractive Hubbard model of superfluidity in the anisotropic honeycomb lattice. At weak coupling, we find that the maximum mean-field pairing transition temperature, as a function of density and interaction strength, occurs for the case with isotropic hopping amplitudes. In this isotropic case, we go beyond mean-field theory and study collective fluctuations, treating both pairing and density fluctuations for interaction strengths ranging from weak to strong coupling. We find evidence for a sharp sound mode, together with a well-defined Leggett mode over a wide region of the phase diagram. We also calculate the superfluid order parameter and collective modes in the presence of nonzero superfluid flow. The flow-induced softening of these collective modes leads to dynamical instabilities involving stripelike density modulations as well as a Leggett-mode instability associated with the natural sublattice symmetry-breaking charge-ordered state on the honeycomb lattice. The latter provides a nontrivial test for the experimental realization of the one-band Hubbard model. We delineate regimes of the phase diagram where the critical current is limited by depairing or by such collective instabilities, and discuss experimental implications of our results.
We study the superfluid phase of the one-band attractive Hubbard model of fermions as a prototype of a strongly correlated sss-wave fermion superfluid on a lattice. We show that the collective mode spectrum of this superfluid exhibits, in addition to the long wavelength sound mode, a sharp roton mode over a wide range of densities and interaction strengths. We compute the sound velocity and the roton gap within a generalized random phase approximation (GRPA) and show that the GRPA results are in good agreement, at strong coupling, with a spin-wave analysis of the appropriate strong-coupling pseudospin model. We also investigate, using this two-pronged approach, the breakdown of superfluidity in the presence of a supercurrent. We find that the superflow can break down at a critical flow momentum via several distinct mechanisms---depairing, Landau instabilities or dynamical instabilities---depending on the dimension, the interaction strength and the fermion density. The most interesting of these instabilities is a charge modulation dynamical instability which is distinct from previously studied dynamical instabilities of Bose superfluids. The charge order associated with this instability can be of two types: (i) a commensurate checkerboard modulation driven by softening of the roton mode at the Brillouin zone corner, or, (ii) an incommensurate density modulation arising from superflow-induced finite momentum pairing of Bogoliubov quasiparticles. We elucidate the dynamical phase diagram showing the critical flow momentum of the leading instability over a wide range of fermion densities and interaction strengths and point out implications of our results for experiments on cold atom fermion superfluids in an optical lattice.
This Thesis explores the formation of novel phases in Dirac systems that are driven by strong many-body interactions and collective quantum fluctuations. The central focus is the half-filled honeycomb lattice, which is the prototypical Dirac semimetal with low-energy excitations described by Dirac fermions. Of particular interest are exotic phases of matter that are not favoured at mean-field but are stabilised by fluctuations. Self-consistent path integral techniques are used to demonstrate that extended repulsive interactions favour charge order that breaks translational and other lattice symmetries. This charge order outcompetes interaction induced topological insulating phases, which are dominant at the mean-field level. The interacting quantum critical point was found to be near the critical point of a topological Lifshitz transition. Interacting Dirac fermions exhibit perhaps the simplest example of fermionic quantum criticality. Gross-Neveu-Yukawa field theories describe the universality class of semimetal-insulator transitions, which are driven by on-site and nearest neighbour repulsive interactions on the honeycomb lattice. The Dirac fermions couple to the dynamical order parameter fields and play a crucial role in determining the universal behaviour. Naturally, this variety of criticality is outside of the Ginzburg-Landau-Wilson paradigm. This idea is extended to include the translational symmetry breaking charge order. Here it is found that the breaking of crystal symmetries corresponds to Lorentz violating effective field theories. The criticality is analysed with the renormalisation group. The low energy excitations at the topological transition are gapless semi-Dirac fermionic quasiparticles that disperse linearly in one direction and quadratically in the other. The instabilities induced by generic short-range repulsions are investigated. The criticality of this anisotropic system is analysed with the renormalisation group in two spatial dimensions, and it is found to exhibit anisotropic order parameter correlations.
We study the Higgs amplitude mode in the sss-wave superfluid state on the honeycomb lattice inspired by recent cold atom experiments. We consider the attractive Hubbard model and focus on the vicinity of a quantum phase transition between semimetal and superfluid phases. On either side of the transition, we find collective mode excitations that are stable against decay into quasiparticle pairs. In the semimetal phase, the collective modes have ``Cooperon'' and exciton character. These modes smoothly evolve across the quantum phase transition, and become the Anderson-Bogoliubov mode and the Higgs mode of the superfluid phase. The collective modes are accommodated within a window in the quasiparticle-pair continuum, which arises as a consequence of the linear Dirac dispersion on the honeycomb lattice, and allows for sharp collective excitations. Bragg scattering can be used to measure these excitations in cold atom experiments, providing a rare example wherein collective modes can be tracked across a quantum phase transition.
Spinless fermions on the honeycomb lattice with repulsive nearest-neighbor interactions are known to harbour a quantum critical point at half-filling, with critical behavior in the Gross-Neveu (chiral Ising) universality class. The critical interaction strength separates a weak-coupling semimetallic regime from a commensurate charge-density-wave phase. The phase diagram of this basic model of correlated fermions on the honeycomb lattice beyond half-filling is, however, less well established. Here, we perform an analysis of its many-body instabilities using the functional renormalization group method with a basic Fermi surface patching scheme, which allows us to treat instabilities in competing channels on equal footing also away from half-filling. Between half-filling and the Van Hove filling, the free Fermi surface is holelike and we again find a charge-density wave instability to be dominant at large interactions. Moreover, its characteristics are those of the half-filled case. Directly at the Van Hove filling, the nesting property of the free Fermi surface stabilizes a dimerized bond-order phase. At lower filling, the free Fermi surface becomes electronlike and a superconducting instability with fff-wave symmetry is found to emerge from the interplay of intra-unit-cell repulsion and collective fluctuations in the proximity to the charge-density wave instability. We estimate the extent of the various phases and extract the corresponding order parameters from the effective low-energy Hamiltonians.
The superfluid properties of attractive Hubbard model in dice lattice are investigated. It is found that three superfluid order parameters increase as the interaction increases. When the filling factor falls into the flat band, due to the infinite large density of states, the resultant superfluid order parameters are proportional to interaction strength, which is in striking contrast with the exponentially small counterparts in usual superfluid (or superconductor). When the interaction is weak, and the filling factor is near the bottom of the lowest band (or the top of highest band), the superfluid density is determined by the effective mass of the lowest (or highest) single-particle band. When the interaction is strong and filling factor is small, the superfluid density is inversely proportional to interaction strength, which is related to effective mass of tightly bound pairs. In the strong interaction limit and finite filling, the asymptotic behaviors of superfluid density can be captured by a parabolic function of filling factor. Furthermore, when the filling is in flat band, the superfluid density shows a logarithmic singularity as the interaction approaches zero. In addition, there exist three undamped collective modes for strong interactions. The lowest excitation is gapless phonon, which is characterized by the total density oscillations. The two others are gapped Leggett modes, which correspond relative density fluctuations between sublattices. The collective modes are also reflected in the two-particle spectral functions by sharp peaks. Furthermore, it is found that the two-particle spectral functions satisfy an exact sum-rule, which is directly related to the filling factor (or density of particle). The sum-rule of the spectral functions may be useful to distinguish between the hole-doped and particle-doped superfluid (superconductor) in experiments.
In addition to the conventional contribution that is directly controlled by the single-particle energy spectrum, the superfluid phase stiffness of a two-component Fermi gas has a geometric contribution that is governed by the quantum metric of the honeycomb's band structure. Here we take both contributions into account and construct phase diagrams for the critical superfluid transition temperature as a function of the chemical potential, particle filling, onsite interaction, and next-nearest-neighbor hopping. Our theoretical approach is based on a self-consistent solution of the BCS mean-field theory for the stationary Cooper pairs and the universal Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) relation for the phase fluctuations.