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arXiv:1904.07138

A Rigorous Demonstration of Superconductivity in a Repulsive Hubbard Model

Manjinder Kainth, M W Long

Published Apr 15, 2019• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We have rigorously shown that a strong Hubbard repulsion can cause superconductivity. The model, which has a particular set of local symmetries, manifests the phase diagram of many unconventional superconductors; anti-ferromagnetism paramagnetism, superconductivity, and even ferromagnetism are all observed. The key technique in the analysis is an exact non-linear fermion transformation, which preserves the correlated motion of electrons while removing the strong interactions. Using resolvent formalism, it is exactly shown that two holes at the Mott point bind to form a localised Cooper pair. As interactions are now weak, we then use BCS mean field theory to calculate the energy, excess pairing, and superconducting gap. These results are compared to exact diagonalisation of finite sized systems and show good agreement. At the Mott point the system is an anti-ferromagnet, and a superconducting phase quickly appears upon doping, and then vanishes.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1904.07138

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We have rigorously shown that a strong Hubbard repulsion can cause superconductivity. The model, which has a particular set of local symmetries, manifests the phase diagram of many unconventional superconductors; anti-ferromagnetism paramagnetism, superconductivity, and even ferromagnetism are all observed. The key technique in the analysis is an exact non-linear fermion transformation, which preserves the correlated motion of electrons while removing the strong interactions. Using resolvent formalism, it is exactly shown that two holes at the Mott point bind to form a localised Cooper pair. As interactions are now weak, we then use BCS mean field theory to calculate the energy, excess pairing, and superconducting gap. These results are compared to exact diagonalisation of finite sized systems and show good agreement. At the Mott point the system is an anti-ferromagnet, and a superconducting phase quickly appears upon doping, and then vanishes.
High temperature superconductivity in copper oxides (cuprates) represents one of the most striking phenomena in condensed matter physics. These materials host superconducting states with the highest known critical temperatures, emerging upon doping antiferromagnetic insulator compounds. The antiferromagnetic (AF) insulating and superconducting (SC) phases defy standard descriptions in terms of band picture and conventional phonon-mediated superconductivity. In fact, these phenomena are genuine signatures of strong electronic correlations which hinder effective single-particle descriptions of the many-electron system. After 40 years since their discovery, it is widely accepted that the Hubbard model on the square lattice provides a minimal description of the low-energy electronic properties of cuprates. 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Namely, we approximate the ground state by implementing a variational search in the subspace of the many-body Hilbert space of gaussian states. Despite its simplicity, the Hartree-Fock method provides a powerful framework to study competition among different phases, originating from different symmetry breaking mechanisms. In particular, we study the competition between three different phases: the normal phase, characterised by no symmetry breaking, the AF phase, characterised by a lowering of SU(2) symmetry, and the SC phase, characterised by the breaking of U(1) charge conservation. This thesis work led to a number of original results, which can be summarised by the general observation that the non-local attraction -V acts cooperatively with the local repulsion U for the stabilisation of the various phases hosted by the Hubbard model. For the normal phase, we find that the non-local attraction acts as a source of Mott localisation, leading to an effective reduction of the electronic bandwidth. In particular, for values of V larger than a critical value and close to half-filling, we find a strong Mott localisation characterised by the complete flattening of the electronic bands. Interestingly, this result shows an example of Mott localisation that can be described at the level of the Hartree-Fock approximation, whereas Mott localisation in the conventional Hubbard model usually requires more sophisticated approximation schemes. For the AF phase, we restrict our analysis to the half-filled case. We find that the pairing-induced Mott localisation leads to a significant enhancement of the magnetisation, primarily originating from the local repulsion U. 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To summarise, the original results obtained in this thesis show that the non-local pairing provides a different route towards the formation of key strongly correlated phenomena, including Mott localisation and nematic superconductivity, and call for future investigation using more sophisticated methods such as, for example, the Dynamical Mean Field Theory.
Motivated by a scarcity of simple and analytically tractable models of superconductivity from strong repulsive interactions, we introduce a simple tight-binding lattice model of fermions with repulsive interactions that exhibits unconventional superconductivity (beyond BCS theory). The model resembles an idealized trilayer. The Cooper pair consists of electrons on opposite sides of the dielectric, which mediates the attraction. In the strong coupling limit, we use degenerate perturbation theory to show that the model reduces to a superconducting hard-core Bose-Hubbard model. Above the superconducting critical temperature, an analog of pseudo-gap physics results where the fermions remain Cooper paired with a large single-particle energy gap.
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The ground-state phase diagram of the one-dimensional Hubbard chain with pair-hopping interaction is studied. The analysis of the model is performed using the continuum-limit field theory approach and exact diagonalization studies. At half-filling the phase diagram is shown to consist of two superconducting states with Cooper-pair center-of-mass momentum $Q=0 (\mathrm{BCS}\ensuremath{-}{\ensuremath{\eta}}_{0}$ phase) and $Q=\ensuremath{\pi} ({\ensuremath{\eta}}_{\ensuremath{\pi}}$ phase) and four insulating phases corresponding to the Mott antiferromagnet, the Peierls dimerized phase, the charge-density-wave (CDW) insulator, and an unconventional insulating phase characterized by the coexistence of a CDW and a bond-located staggered magnetization. Away from half-filling the phase diagram consists of the superconducting $\mathrm{BCS}\ensuremath{-}{\ensuremath{\eta}}_{0}$ and ${\ensuremath{\eta}}_{\ensuremath{\pi}}$ phases and the metallic Luttinger-liquid phase. The $\mathrm{BCS}\ensuremath{-}{\ensuremath{\eta}}_{0}$ phase exhibits a smooth crossover from a weak-coupling BCS type to a strong-coupling local-pair regime. The ${\ensuremath{\eta}}_{\ensuremath{\pi}}$ phase shows the properties of the doublon (zero-size Cooper-pair) superconductor with Cooper-pair center-of-mass momentum $Q=\ensuremath{\pi}.$ The transition into the ${\ensuremath{\eta}}_{\ensuremath{\pi}}$-paired state corresponds to an abrupt change in the ground-state structure. After the transition the conduction band is completely destroyed and a new ${\ensuremath{\eta}}_{\ensuremath{\pi}}$-pair band, corresponding to the strongly correlated doublon motion, is created.
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The understanding of the mechanisms responsible for superconductivity in strongly correlated systems is an interesting and important subject in condensed matter physics. Several theoretical proposals were considered for these systems. The Coulomb interaction between electrons allow a new approach to study this problem. In this paper, we use a usual Hubbard model with a local repulsive interaction to describe a 2D system. The system of equations are solved using the Green's functions method, within a Hubbard-I mean field approximation, which allows to treat the strong interaction limit. We consider both cases of attractive and repulsive interactions and obtain the zero temperature phase diagram of the model. Our results show, in the repulsive case, the existence of a superconducting ground state mediated by the kinetic electronic energy and described by a non-local order parameter. A minimum value of the repulsive interaction UminU_{min}Umin​ is required to create a pairing state. At finite temperatures, for strong interactions, the critical temperature TcT_cTc​ shows a saturation similar to the Bose-Einstein condensation observed for strong attractive interactions.