Polarons originating from phonon displacement modulated hopping have relatively light masses and thus are of significant current interest as candidates for the bipolaron mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity [Sous et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 247001 (2018)]. We observe that the bond model, when the dominant coupling comes from atomic vibrations on lattice bonds, can be solved by efficient sign-free Monte Carlo methods based on the path-integral formulation of the particle sector in combination with either the (real-space) diagrammatic or Fock-path-integral representation of the phonon sector. We introduce the corresponding algorithms and provide illustrative results for singlet bipolarons in two dimensions. The data suggest that the route towards high-temperature superconductivity (if any) in the multiparametric space of the model lies between the Scylla of large size of moderately light bipolarons and the Charybdis of large mass of compact bipolarons. As a result, on-site repulsion is helping $s$-wave superconductivity in sharp contrast with existing expectations.
Polarons originating from phonon displacement modulated hopping have relatively light masses and thus are of significant current interest as candidates for the bipolaron mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity [Sous et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 247001 (2018)]. We observe that the bond model, when the dominant coupling comes from atomic vibrations on lattice bonds, can be solved by efficient sign-free Monte Carlo methods based on the path-integral formulation of the particle sector in combination with either the (real-space) diagrammatic or Fock-path-integral representation of the phonon sector. We introduce the corresponding algorithms and provide illustrative results for singlet bipolarons in two dimensions. The data suggest that the route towards high-temperature superconductivity (if any) in the multiparametric space of the model lies between the Scylla of large size of moderately light bipolarons and the Charybdis of large mass of compact bipolarons. As a result, on-site repulsion is helping s-wave superconductivity in sharp contrast with existing expectations.
We employ the diagrammatic Monte Carlo method with a lattice path-integral formulation for both electron and phonon degrees of freedom to investigate the formation and properties of bond polarons and bipolarons on a two-dimensional triangular lattice. In the deep adiabatic regime ($\ensuremath{\omega}/t<1.0$), single polarons remain light with a small effective mass, while bipolarons remain compact and lightweight, resulting in a high superfluid transition temperature Tc. We systematically study the dependence of Tc on electron-phonon coupling strength and on-site interaction in the bond bipolaron model. Our results show that a moderate on-site repulsion enhances Tc by stabilizing compact yet lightweight bipolarons, leading to high-Tc superconductivity in the dilute limit. Notably, the triangular lattice sustains relatively high Tc across a wide range of phonon frequencies, outperforming square lattice geometry. This enhancement arises from the higher coordination number and the bond-centered nature of the electron-phonon coupling. These findings suggest that triangular lattice geometry offers a promising platform for realizing high-Tc bipolaronic superconductivity.
Using numerically exact diagrammatic Monte Carlo simulations in the two-electron (single-bipolaron) sector, we explore the impact of long-range Coulomb repulsion on the dilute-limit Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition temperature T c of bipolarons on a two-dimensional square lattice. We study the bond Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model, in which bond phonons modulate the electron hopping. In the absence of long-range repulsion, this model was shown to support small, light bipolarons with a comparatively high transition temperature [C. Zhang, J. Sous, D. R. Reichman, M. Berciu, A. J. Millis, N. V. Prokof’ev, and B. V. Svistunov, Bipolaronic high-temperature superconductivity, ]. Here, we find that long-range Coulomb repulsion suppresses the optimal T c but leaves it appreciable over a broad parameter window, including the adiabatic regime ω / t = 0.5 at a representative Coulomb strength V = U / 10 (with U the on-site repulsion). Our results provide controlled single-bipolaron inputs for dilute-limit T c estimates in the presence of long-range repulsion.
Polarons with different types of electron-phonon coupling have fundamentally different properties. When the dominant interaction is between the electron density and lattice displacement, the momentum of the ground state does not change and the polaron gets exponentially heavy at strong coupling. In contrast, one-dimensional Peierls/Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (PSSH) polarons with interaction originating from displacement-modulated hopping feature a shift of the ground-state momentum to finite values and moderate values of effective mass as coupling is increased [D. J. J. Marchand et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 266605 (2010)]. Based on Diagrammatic Monte Carlo method, we investigate whether unusual properties of PSSH polarons depend on the type of the displacement-modulated hopping and to what degree they survive in higher dimension. We study two different PSSH models: with bosonic degrees of freedom residing on sites (model A) and bonds (model B) of the two-dimensional square lattice. For model A, we find that in both adiabatic and intermediate regimes, the momentum of the ground state experiences a continuous transition from zero to a finite value as a function of coupling strength. The transition is driven by quadratic instability of the dispersion function, implying that effective mass diverges at the critical point, and then decreases in an anisotropic fashion with increasing coupling. Unexpectedly, for model B, the momentum of the ground state always stays at zero and the effective mass increases monotonously with coupling. The increase is far from exponential and tends to level off at strong interaction, resulting in relatively light polarons. Having light polarons in the strong coupling regime is crucial for the bipolaron mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity [J. Sous, M. Chakraborty, R. V. Krems, and M. Berciu, Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 247001 (2018).]
We report a breakthrough development allowing one to solve a broad class of polaron problems with highly nonlinear electron-phonon coupling that were considered unsolvable without uncontrolled simplifications in the past using a Monte Carlo technique formulated in the coordinate representation for both the particle and the atomic displacements. The only condition is the sign positivity of the hopping amplitude. The technique dramatically simplifies (with the corresponding efficiency gains) for models with dispersionless phonons. Our study sheds important light on the nature and universality of the most striking qualitative and quantitative effects demonstrated by the ``standard'' (Peierls/Su-Schrieffer-Heeger) model based on the linearized displacement-modulated hopping.
In most cases, as the strength of electron-phonon coupling increases, the effective mass of polarons typically increases. However, in this paper, we uncover a fascinating phenomenon: the presence of light polarons even within the strong coupling regime, where electron-phonon coupling includes both Holstein and bond types (electron-phonon coupling occurring on the hopping bonds). To investigate this, we employ a diagrammatic Monte Carlo method based on the path-integral formulation of the particle sector and the Fock-state representation of the phonon sector. Our study centers on analyzing the impact of bond electron-phonon coupling on the Holstein polaron's essential properties, including its effective mass, ground-state energy, and the average number of phonons. We examine two distinct scenarios: one where the phonon frequency of both Holstein and bond types is the same, and another where the phonon frequency of the Holstein type is twice as large as that of the bond type. In both of these cases, when the Holstein coupling falls within the light mass regime, we observe minimal changes in the effective mass as a function of bond coupling, compared to the case of the bare bond polaron. However, the behavior of the effective mass undergoes a significant change in the heavy mass regime. Most intriguingly, we discover a nonmonotonic dependence of the effective mass on the bond coupling gB when the Holstein coupling gH falls within the heavy mass regime. This finding holds promise, particularly in the context of bipolarons, where achieving a light effective mass and a large binding energy to get a compact size is crucial.
We review a series of exact, analytical and numerical results obtained on the adiabatic Holstein–Hubbard model, many of which are new and non-trivial. We study next the role of the quantum lattice fluctuations that were initially neglected. The possibility of having high- T c bipolaronic superconductors is analysed on the basis of these results. We suggest that models that involve only electron–phonon coupling are very unlikely to produce bipolaronic superconductivity, which is prevented by the spatial ordering of the bipolarons associated with a lattice instability. This is due to a very large effective mass of the bipolarons that can be related to the large Peierls–Nabarro energy barrier required to move these bipolarons through the lattice in the adiabatic limit. We conjecture that high- T c superconductivity originates specifically from the exceptionally well-balanced competition between electron–phonon coupling and electron–electron repulsion. In the restricted region in which, within the mean field approach, the energy of a bipolaron is close to those of two polarons, a new type of electron pairing occurs by formation of pairs of polarons in the spin singlet state. Such a polaron pair, called a spin resonant bipolaron (SRB), is not the standard bipolaron (both could exist in the adiabatic case). Its Peierls–Nabarro energy barrier can be sharply depressed, almost to zero. As a result of quantum lattice fluctuations, its tunnelling energy is sharply enhanced. Then, superconductivity could persist for a relatively large electron–phonon coupling, with an unusually large critical temperature as a Bose condensate of SRBs before becoming, at larger coupling and in any case, an insulating spin–Peierls polaronic phase.