Light-mass bipolarons in off-diagonally coupled electron-phonon systems provide a potential route to bipolaronic high-Tc superconductivity. While there has been numerical progress in the physically relevant limit of slow phonons, more insights are needed to fully understand to what extent this mechanism survives at finite densities and in different regimes. We address these questions using advanced tensor-network methods applied to the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model. Studying both the spectral properties of isolated bipolarons as well as the pairing correlations at small finite densities, we find evidence that the conventional picture of bipolarons as molecular bound states which undergo Bose-Einstein condensation may need to be reconsidered. Instead, our findings suggest correlation-driven formation of a fragmented condensate with spatially separated polaron pairs, stabilized by strong repulsive electron-electron interactions at moderate values of the electron-phonon coupling. These spatially modulated charge clouds exhibit pairing with a typical length-scale set by the Fermi momentum.
Light-mass bipolarons in off-diagonally coupled electron-phonon systems provide a potential route to bipolaronic high-Tc superconductivity. While there has been numerical progress in the physically relevant limit of slow phonons, more insights are needed to fully understand to what extent this mechanism survives at finite densities and in different regimes. We address these questions using advanced tensor-network methods applied to the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model. Studying both the spectral properties of isolated bipolarons as well as the pairing correlations at small finite densities, we find evidence that the conventional picture of bipolarons as molecular bound states which undergo Bose-Einstein condensation may need to be reconsidered. Instead, our findings suggest correlation-driven formation of a fragmented condensate with spatially separated polaron pairs, stabilized by strong repulsive electron-electron interactions at moderate values of the electron-phonon coupling. These spatially modulated charge clouds exhibit pairing with a typical length-scale set by the Fermi momentum.
We analyze the transition temperature Tc of bipolaronic superconductivity in a bond Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (bond-SSH) model---also known as a bond Peierls model---where bond phonons modulate the electron hoppings. Using a semiclassical instanton approximation justifiable in the adiabatic limit of slow phonons, we find that the bipolaron mass is only weakly enhanced in contrast to the typically large mass enhancement found in models where the phonons couple to electron density. Strikingly, in the ``atomic'' limit, we find a bond bipolaron can freely slide within a continuously degenerate energy manifold, explaining the origin of the weak mass enhancement in the strong coupling limit. A gas of these bipolarons can undergo a superfluid transition at a critical temperature for which we obtain an upper bound. This bound is exponentially larger than that in the Holstein model. Our study provides an analytical understanding of the mechanism behind the high-Tc bipolaronic superconductivity numerically observed in [Phys. Rev. X 13, 011010 (2023)].
Theoretical studies suggest that Su-Schrieffer-Heeger-like electron-phonon (e-ph) interactions can mediate high-temperature bipolaronic superconductivity that is robust against repulsive electron-electron interactions. Here we present a comparative analysis of the pairing and competing charge/bond correlations in the two-dimensional Holstein and optical Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) models using numerically exact determinant quantum Monte Carlo. We find that the SSH interactions support light bipolarons and strong superconducting correlations out to relatively large values of the e-ph coupling λ and densities near half-filling, while the Holstein interaction does not due to the formation of heavy bipolarons and competing charge-density-wave order. We further find that the Holstein and SSH models have comparable pairing correlations in the weak coupling limit for carrier concentrations ⟨n⟩≪1, where competing orders and polaronic effects are absent. These results support the proposal that SSH (bi)polarons can support superconductivity to larger values of λ in comparison to the Holstein polaron, but that the resulting Tc gains are small in the weak coupling limit. We also find that the SSH model's pairing correlations are suppressed after including a weak on-site Hubbard repulsion. These results have important implications for identifying and engineering bipolaronic superconductivity.
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.
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).]
Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) electron-phonon ($e\ensuremath{-}p\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}h$) interactions have been theorized to play critical roles in several novel states of matter, ranging from nontrivial topological states to high-temperature bipolaronic superconductivity. This work compares the superconducting and competing charge and bond correlations of the two-dimensional Holstein and optical (SSH) models. The authors find that near half-filling, light SSH (bi)polarons support superconductivity to larger values of $e\ensuremath{-}p\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}h$ coupling compared to the Holstein polaron. These results are essential for identifying and engineering bipolaronic superconductivity in quantum materials.
A finite-range Fröhlich electron-phonon interaction (EPI) with c-axis polarized optical phonons has been identified in cuprate superconductors by photoemission spectroscopy, in agreement with an earlier proposal by Alexandrov and Kornilovitch [1]. In this article, we discuss the consequences of long-range interactions on phonon-mediated local pairing. First, we examine the effects of modifying interaction range and lattice geometries with regard to analytical strong-coupling/non-adiabatic results for ladder systems. To test the applicability of the analytic results to experimentally achievable couplings and phonon frequencies, we apply a continuous time quantum Monte-Carlo algorithm (CTQMC) to the computation of the effective mass and pairing radius of lattice bipolarons. We demonstrate that bipolarons can be simultaneously small and light due to a novel crab-like motion. Such light, small bipolarons are a necessary precursor to high-temperature Bose-Einstein condensation in solids.