superconductors, remains one of the greatest puzzles in condensed matter physics. One possible mechanism is fermionic incoherence, which near a quantum critical point allows pair formation but suppresses superconductivity. Employing quantum Monte Carlo simulations of a model of itinerant fermions coupled to ferromagnetic spin fluctuations, represented by a quantum rotor, we report numerical evidence of pseudogap behavior, emerging from pairing fluctuations in a quantum-critical non-Fermi liquid. Specifically, we observe enhanced pairing fluctuations and a partial gap opening in the fermionic spectrum. However, the system remains non-superconducting until reaching a much lower temperature. In the pseudogap regime the system displays a "gap-filling" rather than "gap-closing" behavior, similar to the one observed in cuprate superconductors. Our results present direct evidence of the pseudogap state, driven by superconducting fluctuations.
The origin of the pseudogap behavior, found in many high-
Tc superconductors, remains one of the greatest puzzles in condensed matter physics. One possible mechanism is fermionic incoherence, which near a quantum critical point allows pair formation but suppresses superconductivity. Employing quantum Monte Carlo simulations of a model of itinerant fermions coupled to ferromagnetic spin fluctuations, represented by a quantum rotor, we report numerical evidence of pseudogap behavior, emerging from pairing fluctuations in a quantum-critical non-Fermi liquid. Specifically, we observe enhanced pairing fluctuations and a partial gap opening in the fermionic spectrum. However, the system remains non-superconducting until reaching a much lower temperature. In the pseudogap regime the system displays a gap-filling rather than gap-closing behavior, consistent with experimental observations. Our results provide the first unambiguous lattice model realization of a pseudogap state in a strongly correlated system, driven by superconducting fluctuations.
The two-dimensional attractive Hubbard model is studied in the weak-to-intermediate-coupling regime by employing a nonperturbative approach. It is shown that this approach is in quantitative agreement with Monte Carlo calculations for both single-particle and two-particle quantities. Both the density of states and the single-particle spectral weight show a pseudogap at the Fermi energy below some characteristic temperature
T∗, also in good agreement with quantum Monte Carlo calculations. The pseudogap is caused by critical pairing fluctuations in the low-temperature renormalized classical regime $(\ensuremath{\Elzxh}\ensuremath{\omega}<{k}_{B}T)$ of the two-dimensional system. With increasing temperature the spectral weight fills in the pseudogap instead of closing it, and the pseudogap appears earlier in the density of states than in the spectral function. Small temperature changes around
T∗ can modify the spectral weight over frequency scales much larger than temperature. Several qualitative results for the s-wave case should remain true for d-wave superconductors.
The pseudogap state of cuprate high-temperature superconductors has been often viewed as either a yet unknown competing order or a precursor state to superconductivity. While awaiting the resolution of the pseudogap problem in cuprates, we demonstrate that local pairing fluctuations, vortex liquid dynamics, and other precursor phenomena can emerge quite generally whenever fermionic excitations remain gapped across the superconducting transition, regardless of the gap origin. Our choice of a tractable model is a lattice band insulator with short-range attractive interactions between fermions in the
s-wave channel. An effective crossover between Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) and Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) regimes can be identified in any band insulator above two dimensions, while in two dimensions only the BEC regime exists. The superconducting transition is ``unconventional'' (non-pair-breaking) in the BEC regime, identified by either the bosonic mean field or
XY universality class. The insulator adjacent to the superconductor in the BEC regime is a bosonic Mott insulator of Cooper pairs, which may be susceptible to charge density wave ordering. We construct a function of the many-body excitation spectrum whose nonanalytic changes define a sharp distinction between band and Mott insulators. The corresponding ``second-order transition'' can be observed out of equilibrium by driving a Cooper pair laser in the Mott insulator. We explicitly show that the gap for charged bosonic excitations lies below the threshold for Cooper pair breakup in any BEC regime, despite quantum fluctuations. Our discussion ends with a view of possible consequences for cuprates, where antinodal pair dynamics has certain features in common with our simple
s-wave picture.
There are two seemingly unrelated puzzles about the cuprate superconductors. The first puzzle concerns the strong non-BCS behavior around
xc, the end point of the superconducting dome on the overdoped side, where the cuprate is believed to be well described by the Fermi-liquid theory. This is the most evident in the observed ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{s}(0)\ensuremath{-}{T}_{c}$ scaling and the large amount of uncondensed optical spectral weight at low energy. The second puzzle concerns the remarkable robustness of the
d-wave pairing against the inevitable disorder effect in such a doped system, which is also totally unexpected from the conventional BCS picture. Here we show that these two puzzles are deeply connected to the origin of a third puzzle about the cuprate superconductors, namely, the mysterious quantum critical behavior observed around
x∗, the so called pseudogap end point. Through a systematic variational Monte Carlo (VMC) study of the disordered 2D $t\ensuremath{-}J$ model from the resonating valence bond (RVB) perspective, we find that the
d-wave pairing in this model is remarkably more robust against the disorder effect than that in a conventional
d-wave BCS superconductor. We find that such remarkable robustness can be attributed to the spin-charge separation mechanism in the RVB picture, through which the
d-wave RVB pairing of the charge-neutral spinons becomes essentially immune to the disorder potential except for the secondary effect related to the modulation of the local doping level by the disorder. We propose that there exists a Mott transition at
x∗, where the RVB pairing in the underdoped regime is transmuted into the increasingly more BCS-like pairing for
x>x∗, whose increasing fragility against the disorder effect leads to the non-BCS behavior and the ultimate suppression of superconductivity around
xc.
A variety of analytical techniques suggest that quantum fluctuations lead to a fundamental instability of the Fermi liquid that drives ferromagnetic transitions first order at low temperatures.We present both analytical and numerical evidence that, driven by the same quantum fluctuations, this first order transition is preempted by the formation of an inhomogeneous magnetic phase.This occurs in a manner that is closely analogous to the formation of the inhomogeneous superconducting Fulde-Ferrel-Larkin-Ovchinnikov state.We derive these results from a field-theoretical approach supplemented with numerical quantum Monte Carlo simulations.
The condensation of paired fermions into superfluid states changes progressively depending on the coupling strength. At the midpoint of the crossover between Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) weak-coupling and Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) strong-coupling limits, paired fermions condensate most robustly, thereby leading to the emergence of a pseudogap due to enhanced pairing fluctuations. In the case of electrons in solids, excessively strong interactions often induce competing electronic orders instead of strong-coupling superconductivity, and experimental comprehension of the pseudogap remains incomplete. In this study, we provide experimental evidence demonstrating the opening of a pseudogap, marking the incipient stage of the BCS-BEC crossover in the organic system $\ensuremath{\kappa}\text{\ensuremath{-}}(\mathrm{BEDT}\text{\ensuremath{-}}{\mathrm{TTF})}_{2}X$. By controlling electron correlations, we investigate the thermodynamic properties of the BCS-BEC crossover and pseudogap phase. Since the superconductivity of $\ensuremath{\kappa}\text{\ensuremath{-}}{(\text{BEDT}\text{\ensuremath{-}}\mathrm{TTF})}_{2}X$ arises from a simple Fermi liquid that does not exhibit any other electronic orders, our study sheds light on the inherent nature of the BCS-BEC crossover.