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arXiv:1610.01803 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Band geometry, Berry curvature, and superfluid weight

Long Liang, Tuomas I. Vanhala, Sebastiano Peotta, Topi Siro, Ari Harju, Päivi Törmä

Published Jan 27, 2017• 272 citations
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Abstract

We present a theory of the superfluid weight in multiband attractive Hubbard models within the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) mean-field framework. We show how to separate the geometric contribution to the superfluid weight from the conventional one, and that the geometric contribution is associated with the interband matrix elements of the current operator. Our theory can be applied to systems with or without time-reversal symmetry. In both cases the geometric superfluid weight can be related to the quantum metric of the corresponding noninteracting systems. This leads to a lower bound on the superfluid weight given by the absolute value of the Berry curvature. We apply our theory to the attractive Kane-Mele-Hubbard and Haldane-Hubbard models, which can be realized in ultracold atom gases. Quantitative comparisons are made to state of the art dynamical mean-field theory and exact diagonalization results.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.95.024515

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We present a theory of the superfluid weight in multiband attractive Hubbard models within the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) mean-field framework. We show how to separate the geometric contribution to the superfluid weight from the conventional one, and that the geometric contribution is associated with the interband matrix elements of the current operator. Our theory can be applied to systems with or without time-reversal symmetry. In both cases the geometric superfluid weight can be related to the quantum metric of the corresponding noninteracting systems. This leads to a lower bound on the superfluid weight given by the absolute value of the Berry curvature. We apply our theory to the attractive Kane-Mele-Hubbard and Haldane-Hubbard models, which can be realized in ultracold atom gases. Quantitative comparisons are made to state of the art dynamical mean-field theory and exact diagonalization results.
We study the size of two-body bound states and Cooper pairs within a multiband Hubbard model that features time-reversal symmetry and uniform pairing on a generic lattice. Our analysis involves (i) an exact calculation of the localization tensor to determine the size of lowest-lying two-body bound state in vacuum, and (ii) an evaluation of the analogous tensor to estimate the average size of Cooper pairs within the mean-field Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer to Bose-Einstein condensate (BCS-BEC) crossover theory at zero temperature. Beyond the conventional intraband contribution that depends on Bloch bands, we show that pair size also has a geometric contribution governed by the quantum-metric tensor of the Bloch states and their band-resolved quantum-metric tensors. As a concrete example, we investigate the pyrochlore-Hubbard model numerically and demonstrate that, while the pair size diverges in the weakly interacting BCS regime of dispersive bands, it remains finite and relatively small in the flat-band regime, even for infinitesimal interaction, perfectly matching the exact two-body result in the dilute limit.
We consider multiband BCS superconductors that exhibit time-reversal symmetry and uniform pairing, and analyze their dynamic density and spin structure factors using linear-response theory within the mean-field BCS-BEC crossover framework at zero temperature. Our results for the multi-orbital Hubbard model satisfy the associated f-sum rules in several limits. In particular, in the strong-coupling limit, they coincide with those of a weakly-interacting Bose gas of Cooper pairs, where the low-energy collective Goldstone modes serve as Bogoliubov phonons. We further reveal that the quantum-geometric origin of the low-energy structure factors, along with related observables such as the superfluid-weight tensor and the effective-mass tensor of Cooper pairs, can be traced all the way back to the effective-mass theorem for Bloch bands in this limit. As an illustration, we investigate the pyrochlore-Hubbard model numerically and demonstrate that the Goldstone modes are the only relevant collective degrees of freedom in the flat-band regime.
Beyond the frozen-pairing contribution, the superfluid weight of a multiband superconductor contains a correction from the self-consistent relaxation of the pairing amplitudes under a phase twist. We show that this correction has a quantum-geometric origin, not in the space of Bloch states but in the space of collective pairing fields. For an attractive multiband Hubbard model at the mean-field level, the thermodynamic Hessian governing the pairing response coincides with the static Gaussian pair-fluctuation kernel at zero momentum at every temperature below TcT_cTc​. Since gauge invariance relates a phase twist to a finite center-of-mass momentum of the pair field, the superfluid weight is set by the small-momentum curvature of the eigenvalue branch that evolves from the Goldstone mode, and the relaxation correction is a stiffness-weighted quantum metric of the corresponding soft eigenvector on the manifold of pairing configurations. The same construction yields the Ginzburg-Landau gradient coefficient with the identical geometric correction, hence the coherence-length tensor, and, with the low-frequency dynamics of the kernel, the pair-mass tensor. Lieb-lattice calculations verify the equivalence of the thermodynamic, fluctuation-kernel, and soft-mode formulations and the independence of the superfluid weight from the orbital embedding.
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.
Despite the multiband spectrum of the widely known Hofstadter butterfly, it turns out that the pairing correlations of the time-reversal-symmetric Hofstadter-Hubbard model are well described by a single order parameter that is uniform in real space. By exploiting a BCS mean-field theory for the nearly flat butterfly-bands regime of low magnetic-flux limit, here we reveal a number of unusual superfluid properties both in the ground state and at finite temperatures. Our thorough analysis includes but is not limited to the order parameter, condensate, and superfluid fractions, and the critical BCS and Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition temperatures.
In a partially filled flat Bloch band electrons do not have a well defined Fermi surface and hence the low-energy theory is not a Fermi liquid. Nevertheless, under the influence of an attractive interaction, a superconductor well described by the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) wave function can arise. Here we study the low-energy effective Hamiltonian of a generic Hubbard model with a flat band. We obtain an effective Hamiltonian for the flat band physics by eliminating higher-lying bands via the perturbative Schrieffer-Wolff transformation. At first order in the interaction energy we recover the usual procedure of projecting the interaction term onto the flat band Wannier functions. We show that the BCS wave function is the exact ground state of the projected interaction Hamiltonian, if a simple uniform pairing condition on the single-particle states is satisfied, and that the compressibility is diverging as a consequence of an emergent SU(2)\text{SU}(2)SU(2) symmetry. This symmetry is broken by second-order interband transitions resulting in a finite compressibility, which we illustrate for a one-dimensional ladder with two perfectly flat bands. These results motivate a further approximation leading to an effective ferromagnetic Heisenberg model. The gauge-invariant result for the superfluid weight of a flat band can be obtained from the ferromagnetic Heisenberg model only if the maximally localized Wannier functions in the Marzari-Vanderbilt sense are used. Finally, we prove an important inequality $D\ensuremath{\ge}{\mathcal{W}}^{2}$ between the Drude weight DDD and the winding number W\mathcal{W}W, which guarantees ballistic transport for topologically nontrivial flat bands in one dimension.