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arXiv:1902.10897 · Physical Review A

Origin of flat-band superfluidity on the Mielke checkerboard lattice

M. Iskin

Published May 13, 2019• 33 citations
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Abstract

The Mielke checkerboard is known to be one of the simplest two-band lattice models exhibiting an energetically flat band that is in touch with a quadratically dispersive band in the reciprocal space, i.e., its flat band is not isolated. Motivated by the growing interest in understanding the origins of flat-band superfluidity in various contexts, here we provide an in-depth analysis showing how the mean-field BCS correlations prevail in this particular model. Our work reveals the quantum-geometric origin of flat-band superfluidity through uncovering the leading role by a band-structure invariant, i.e., the so-called quantum metric tensor of the single-particle bands, in the inverse effective mass tensor of the Cooper pairs.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.99.053608

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The Mielke checkerboard is known to be one of the simplest two-band lattice models exhibiting an energetically flat band that is in touch with a quadratically dispersive band in the reciprocal space, i.e., its flat band is not isolated. Motivated by the growing interest in understanding the origins of flat-band superfluidity in various contexts, here we provide an in-depth analysis showing how the mean-field BCS correlations prevail in this particular model. Our work reveals the quantum-geometric origin of flat-band superfluidity through uncovering the leading role by a band-structure invariant, i.e., the so-called quantum metric tensor of the single-particle bands, in the inverse effective mass tensor of the Cooper pairs.
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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.
In a flat band superconductor, bosonic excitations disperse while unpaired electrons are immobile. To study this strongly interacting system, we construct a family of multi-band Hubbard models with exact eta-pairing ground states in all space groups. We analytically compute their many-body excitations and find that the Cooper pair bound states obey an effective single-boson hopping Hamiltonian written in terms of the non-interacting wavefunctions. These bound states possess a unique zero-energy excitation whose quadratic dispersion is determined by the minimal quantum metric. The rest of the bound state spectrum is classified by topological quantum chemistry, which we use to identify Cooper pairs with Weyl nodes, higher angular momentum pairing, and fragile topology. Broadening the band dispersion, we find the strongest pairing occurs at half filling and not at the highest density of states. Our analytical results prove that the elementary fermionic and bosonic excitations, corresponding respectively to pairing and coherence, are governed by distinct properties of the flat band, rigorously establishing its unique phenomenology. Superconductivity in flat bands is a central feature of quantum geometric effects, supported by mean-field theory and numerics. Here, the authors exhibit a large family of flat band Hubbard models whose ground states, Bogoliubov-de-Gennes particles, and Cooper pairs are exactly solvable with analytically calculable dispersions.
We investigate collective excitations in flat-band superfluids by incorporating the coupled dynamics of pairing (phase and amplitude) and density fluctuations. We demonstrate that for any time-reversal symmetric superfluid system with an isolated flat band, only a single low-energy collective mode emerges in the long-wavelength limit. In contrast to the linearly dispersive Goldstone mode in conventional superfluids, this hybridized mode is gapless at zero momentum but exhibits a quadratic dispersion (ω∝q2ω\propto q^2ω∝q2) at small momenta. We show that the dispersion coefficients of this collective mode are governed by the normal-state quantum metric of the flat band. These analytical predictions are in excellent agreement with numerical calculations. Our results are applicable to any generic sss-wave flat-band superfluid, provided the flat band is energetically well separated from other dispersive bands.
We consider the two-body problem in a periodic potential, and study the bound-state dispersion of a spin-$\ensuremath{\uparrow}$ fermion that is interacting with a spin-$\ensuremath{\downarrow}$ fermion through a short-range attractive interaction. Based on a variational approach, we obtain the exact solution of the dispersion in the form of a set of self-consistency equations, and apply it to tight-binding Hamiltonians with on-site interactions. We pay special attention to the bipartite lattices with a two-point basis that exhibit time-reversal symmetry, and show that the lowest-energy bound states disperse quadratically with momentum, whose effective-mass tensor is partially controlled by the quantum metric tensor of the underlying Bloch states. In particular, we apply our theory to the Mielke checkerboard lattice, and study the special role played by the interband processes in producing a finite effective mass for the bound states in a nonisolated flat band.
The interplay between interactions and quantum geometry can drive weakly dispersive bosons into different exotic many-body phases. In this work we study a quasi flat-band model in one dimension that exhibits an extended pair-superfluid phase in the all-flat-band limit. Introducing single-particle hopping leads to an intriguing competition with a more conventional single-particle superfluid: we find that the pair superfluid remains stable for a finite range of the hopping strength until the system eventually transitions into the conventional superfluid phase. In our study, we make use of a variational Gaussian state approach that provides a unified description of the single-particle and pair superfluid phases, regarding both the ground state wavefunction and the collective excitation spectrum. In particular, we derive a general relation between the speed of sound and a ``quantum geometric kernel'', thereby extending earlier connections to the quantum metric, which relied on single-particle mean-field theory. This approach is combined with insights from the two-boson problem and exact diagonalization to map out the full phase diagram of the model. Our results show that the Gaussian approach is a versatile tool for studying a broad range of superfluid phases of interacting bosons in multi-orbital lattices.