Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:2312.17208 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Microscopic mechanism of pair-, charge-, and spin-density-wave instabilities in interacting D -dimensional Fermi liquids

Dmitry Miserev, Herbert Schoeller, Jelena Klinovaja, Daniel Loss

Published Sep 12, 2024• 3 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We present an analytic theory unraveling the microscopic mechanism of instabilities within interacting $D$-dimensional Fermi liquid. Our model consists of a $D$-dimensional electron gas subject to an instantaneous electron-electron interaction of a finite range exceeding the average interparticle distance. Pair, charge, and spin susceptibilities are evaluated via the one-loop renormalization group theory and via the bosonization approach, giving identical results. In case of a repulsive interaction, we identify an intrinsic Fermi-liquid instability towards insulating spin- and charge-density-wave order when the interaction coupling strength reaches a universal critical value. If both electron and hole pockets of the same size are present, the ground state is an excitonic insulator at arbitrarily small repulsive interaction. If the interaction is attractive, the ground state is a singlet non-BCS superconductor with a uniform condensate. In case if both electron and hole Fermi surfaces are present, we predict an instability towards the interpocket pair-density-wave ordering at the critical coupling. This prediction lends strong theoretical support to the pair-density-wave scenario of superconductivity in cuprate materials. Due to its simple and universal nature, presented microscopic mechanism of intrinsic instabilities of interacting $D$-dimensional Fermi liquids constitutes a solid theoretical ground for understanding quantum phase transitions in a variety of quantum materials, from ultraclean semiconductor quantum wells to high-temperature superconductors.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.110.125128

Related papers

Unified non-Fermi liquid and superconductivity in a model of strongly-correlated systems

Yi Zhang

We study a model of strongly-correlated systems that incorporates phases such as Fermi liquids, non-Fermi liquids, and superconductivity, in addition to potential intertwined orders. The model describes Fermi surfaces of spinful electron gas or electron liquid coupled to bosons via an intermediate gauge field. Effectively, the coupling imposes constraints and interactions between the fermion spin and the local boson density. This grants the bosons the meaning as the Schwinger boson of the magnetic order and allows us to probe a larger phase space, rather than around the quantum critical point. We design the initial model so that after the boson and gauge fields are integrated out exactly, the resulting fermion-only effective theory only consists of several local interactions, allowing controlled weak-coupling interpretation for certain parameter regions. Consequently, we find a non-Fermi liquid whose degrees of freedom in the effective theory take the form of an \emph{emergent} Fermi surface that has a different Luttinger volume from the original fermions, therefore explicitly violates the Luttinger theorem. Further, this allows a $d$-wave superconducting instability if the effective interacting induced by boson coupling is in the relevant pairing channel. When the emergent Fermi surface undergoes a Lifshitz transition, the carrier type changes. In addition, we attribute the Mott insulating behavior in the strong coupling limit to the loss of emergent Fermi surface and argue the possibility of coexisting magnetic order. Our effective theory also suggests the possibility of charge density waves as a consequence of \emph{effective} strong repulsion and is independent of the Fermi-surface-nesting scenario. We discuss the possible optimal conditions for higher superconducting transition temperature and potential relevances and implications for realistic materials.

arXiv:1711.03981•Nov 10, 2017•0 citations

Pair Density Wave Order from Electron Repulsion

Yiming Wu, P. A. Nosov, Aavishkar A. Patel +1 more

A pair density wave (PDW) is a superconductor whose order parameter is a periodic function of space, without an accompanying spatially uniform component. Since PDWs are not the outcome of a weak-coupling instability of a Fermi liquid, a generic pairing mechanism for PDW order has remained elusive. We describe and solve models having robust PDW phases. To access the intermediate coupling limit, we invoke large-N limits of Fermi liquids with repulsive BCS interactions that admit saddle point solutions. We show that the requirements for long-range PDW order are that the repulsive BCS couplings must be nonmonotonic in space and that their strength must exceed a threshold value. We obtain a phase diagram with both finite temperature transitions to PDW order and a T=0 quantum critical point, where non-Fermi liquid behavior occurs.

arXiv:2209.09254•Physical Review Letters•Jan 13, 2023•36 citations

Mechanism for fluctuating pair density wave

Chandan Setty, Laura Fanfarillo, P. J. Hirschfeld

Abstract In weakly coupled BCS superconductors, only electrons within a tiny energy window around the Fermi energy, EF, form Cooper pairs. This may not be the case in strong coupling superconductors such as cuprates, FeSe, SrTiO3 or cold atom condensates where the pairing scale, EB, becomes comparable or even larger than EF. In cuprates, for example, a plausible candidate for the pseudogap state at low doping is a fluctuating pair density wave, but no microscopic model has yet been found which supports such a state. In this work, we write an analytically solvable model to examine pairing phases in the strongly coupled regime and in the presence of anisotropic interactions. Already for moderate coupling we find an unusual finite temperature phase, below an instability temperature Ti, where local pair correlations have non-zero center-of-mass momentum but lack long-range order. At low temperature, this fluctuating pair density wave can condense either to a uniform d-wave super- conductor or the widely postulated pair-density wave phase depending on the interaction strength. Our minimal model offers a unified microscopic framework to understand the emergence of both fluctuating and long range pair density waves in realistic systems.

arXiv:2110.13138•Nature Communications•Jun 1, 2023•30 citations

Superfluidity in Strongly Correlated Systems

Eun Gook Moon

We study superfluidity in strongly correlated systems by focusing three features as follows. First, interplay between superfluidity and other order parameters near quantum critical points is studied. The onset positions of the order parameters with or without superconductivity determines how they interact with each other. For the spin density wave (SDW) transition, we find that the quantum critical point shifts by order |∆|, where ∆ is pairing amplitude, so that the region of SDW order is smaller in the superconductor than in the metal. This shift is larger than the |∆|2 shift predicted by theories of competing orders which ignore Fermi surface effects. Second, we study a doped antiferromagnetic Mott insulator motivated by copper based high temperature superconductors. Based on spin and charge fractionalization, the algebraic charge liquid phase whose bosonic spinons have energy gap but fermionic holons form Fermi surfaces and its superconductivity are studied. We show fluctuations of local SDW order orientation lead to d-wave superconductivity, and its quantum critical pairing mechanisms are investigated. Also, a theory of bound states between spinons and holons is studied. We show that the fractionalization induces a doubling electron-like quasiparticles, which naturally induces the fractionalized Fermi liquid. The bound state theory describes exotic properties of the underdoped Cuprates such as “nodal-antinodal dichotomy” at a mean field level description. At last, we study superfluidity of fermions in optical lattices near the Feshbach resonance. Due to divergence of scattering length at the resonance, universality is observed and characteristics of superfluidity has been studied. We extend such universal properties by considering superfluid-insulator transition with an even integer number of fermions per unit cell. The resulting insulator interpolates between a band insulator of fermions and a Mott insulator of fermion pairs.

•Dec 1, 2011•0 citations

Instabilities of Fermi Liquids with Arbitrary Forward Scattering: Exact Approach

Dmitry Miserev, Joel Hutchinson, Herbert Schoeller +2 more

In this work, we consider $N$-fold degenerate $D$-dimensional electron gas with spherical Fermi surface and arbitrary forward-scattering density-density interaction transferring small momentum compared to the Fermi momentum $k_{\mathrm{F}}$. The dimensional reduction that is mathematically equivalent to the Haldane patch construction and similar multidimensional bosonization techniques, provides a natural map of two-point $D$-dimensional correlation functions (fermion Green function, susceptibilities etc.) onto effective one-dimensional (1D) correlators with the same diagrammatic structure, which can be evaluated exactly within a 1D bosonizable (Gaussian) theory. We then apply this formalism to evaluate the fermion Green function, pair and charge/flavor susceptibilities, as well as the composite correlation functions for the case of a finite-range interaction, where the interaction range $R_{\mathrm{s}} \gg 1/k_{\mathrm{F}}$ is large compared to the Fermi wavelength. First, we find that the single-particle spectral function remains Fermi-liquid-like which is fully consistent with the previous research. In contrast to the single-particle sector, the many-body channels are efficiently dressed by finite-range interactions, and this dressing is fully equivalent to the one-loop renormalization group (RG), which is also in line with previous multidimensional bosonization results. Within the forward-scattering model, stable long-range order is not possible, and relevant susceptibilities demonstrate singular power-law scaling with temperature $T$ at $T \to 0$. The rest of the abstract is in the PDF.

arXiv:2607.06430•Jul 7, 2026•0 citations

Phase transitions in two-dimensional itinerant electron systems

Trott, Matthew James

The aim of this thesis it to contribute to three open problems in the theory of itinerant electron systems in two spatial dimensions. Firstly, the mechanism for charge density wave formation in the transition metal dichalcogenides is a debated subject. In this thesis it is shown that charge density wave formation is possible via a purely electronic mechanism in monolayer vanadium diselenide. The competition of superconductivity and density wave formation is taken into account using the renormalisation group. As the Fermi surface is tuned to perfect nesting, a charge density wave phase emerges when the Heisenberg exchange interaction is of the order of the contact Coulomb repulsion. Secondly, the search for materials which exhibit topological superconductivity is ongoing. Possible candidates are strongly spin-orbit-coupled metals. In this thesis a square-lattice Hubbard model with strong Rashba spin-orbit coupling and one of the Fermi surfaces close to a Lifshitz transition is examined. The metal is shown to be generically unstable to the formation of mixed-parity superconductivity with a helical triplet component via a renormalisation group analysis. Thirdly, the breakdown of Fermi liquid theory close to a quantum critical point is still not well understood. In this thesis a functional renormalisation group analysis is presented using a soft frequency cutoff, investigating a general class of Pomeranchuk instabilities with 𝑁_𝑏 flavours of boson. At small 𝑁_𝑏 the theory is characterised by weakly non-Fermi-liquid behaviour of the electrons and 𝑧≈2 dynamics for the order parameter fluctuations. For large 𝑁_𝑏, the theory crosses over to 𝑧≈1 scaling and non-Fermi-liquid behaviour.

•Dec 1, 2020•0 citations
We present an analytic theory unraveling the microscopic mechanism of instabilities within interacting DDD-dimensional Fermi liquid. Our model consists of a DDD-dimensional electron gas subject to an instantaneous electron-electron interaction of a finite range exceeding the average interparticle distance. Pair, charge, and spin susceptibilities are evaluated via the one-loop renormalization group theory and via the bosonization approach, giving identical results. In case of a repulsive interaction, we identify an intrinsic Fermi-liquid instability towards insulating spin- and charge-density-wave order when the interaction coupling strength reaches a universal critical value. If both electron and hole pockets of the same size are present, the ground state is an excitonic insulator at arbitrarily small repulsive interaction. If the interaction is attractive, the ground state is a singlet non-BCS superconductor with a uniform condensate. In case if both electron and hole Fermi surfaces are present, we predict an instability towards the interpocket pair-density-wave ordering at the critical coupling. This prediction lends strong theoretical support to the pair-density-wave scenario of superconductivity in cuprate materials. Due to its simple and universal nature, presented microscopic mechanism of intrinsic instabilities of interacting DDD-dimensional Fermi liquids constitutes a solid theoretical ground for understanding quantum phase transitions in a variety of quantum materials, from ultraclean semiconductor quantum wells to high-temperature superconductors.
We study a model of strongly-correlated systems that incorporates phases such as Fermi liquids, non-Fermi liquids, and superconductivity, in addition to potential intertwined orders. The model describes Fermi surfaces of spinful electron gas or electron liquid coupled to bosons via an intermediate gauge field. Effectively, the coupling imposes constraints and interactions between the fermion spin and the local boson density. This grants the bosons the meaning as the Schwinger boson of the magnetic order and allows us to probe a larger phase space, rather than around the quantum critical point. We design the initial model so that after the boson and gauge fields are integrated out exactly, the resulting fermion-only effective theory only consists of several local interactions, allowing controlled weak-coupling interpretation for certain parameter regions. Consequently, we find a non-Fermi liquid whose degrees of freedom in the effective theory take the form of an \emph{emergent} Fermi surface that has a different Luttinger volume from the original fermions, therefore explicitly violates the Luttinger theorem. Further, this allows a ddd-wave superconducting instability if the effective interacting induced by boson coupling is in the relevant pairing channel. When the emergent Fermi surface undergoes a Lifshitz transition, the carrier type changes. In addition, we attribute the Mott insulating behavior in the strong coupling limit to the loss of emergent Fermi surface and argue the possibility of coexisting magnetic order. Our effective theory also suggests the possibility of charge density waves as a consequence of \emph{effective} strong repulsion and is independent of the Fermi-surface-nesting scenario. We discuss the possible optimal conditions for higher superconducting transition temperature and potential relevances and implications for realistic materials.
A pair density wave (PDW) is a superconductor whose order parameter is a periodic function of space, without an accompanying spatially uniform component. Since PDWs are not the outcome of a weak-coupling instability of a Fermi liquid, a generic pairing mechanism for PDW order has remained elusive. We describe and solve models having robust PDW phases. To access the intermediate coupling limit, we invoke large-N limits of Fermi liquids with repulsive BCS interactions that admit saddle point solutions. We show that the requirements for long-range PDW order are that the repulsive BCS couplings must be nonmonotonic in space and that their strength must exceed a threshold value. We obtain a phase diagram with both finite temperature transitions to PDW order and a T=0 quantum critical point, where non-Fermi liquid behavior occurs.
Abstract In weakly coupled BCS superconductors, only electrons within a tiny energy window around the Fermi energy, EF, form Cooper pairs. This may not be the case in strong coupling superconductors such as cuprates, FeSe, SrTiO3 or cold atom condensates where the pairing scale, EB, becomes comparable or even larger than EF. In cuprates, for example, a plausible candidate for the pseudogap state at low doping is a fluctuating pair density wave, but no microscopic model has yet been found which supports such a state. In this work, we write an analytically solvable model to examine pairing phases in the strongly coupled regime and in the presence of anisotropic interactions. Already for moderate coupling we find an unusual finite temperature phase, below an instability temperature Ti, where local pair correlations have non-zero center-of-mass momentum but lack long-range order. At low temperature, this fluctuating pair density wave can condense either to a uniform d-wave super- conductor or the widely postulated pair-density wave phase depending on the interaction strength. Our minimal model offers a unified microscopic framework to understand the emergence of both fluctuating and long range pair density waves in realistic systems.
We study superfluidity in strongly correlated systems by focusing three features as follows. First, interplay between superfluidity and other order parameters near quantum critical points is studied. The onset positions of the order parameters with or without superconductivity determines how they interact with each other. For the spin density wave (SDW) transition, we find that the quantum critical point shifts by order |∆|, where ∆ is pairing amplitude, so that the region of SDW order is smaller in the superconductor than in the metal. This shift is larger than the |∆|2 shift predicted by theories of competing orders which ignore Fermi surface effects. Second, we study a doped antiferromagnetic Mott insulator motivated by copper based high temperature superconductors. Based on spin and charge fractionalization, the algebraic charge liquid phase whose bosonic spinons have energy gap but fermionic holons form Fermi surfaces and its superconductivity are studied. We show fluctuations of local SDW order orientation lead to d-wave superconductivity, and its quantum critical pairing mechanisms are investigated. Also, a theory of bound states between spinons and holons is studied. We show that the fractionalization induces a doubling electron-like quasiparticles, which naturally induces the fractionalized Fermi liquid. The bound state theory describes exotic properties of the underdoped Cuprates such as “nodal-antinodal dichotomy” at a mean field level description. At last, we study superfluidity of fermions in optical lattices near the Feshbach resonance. Due to divergence of scattering length at the resonance, universality is observed and characteristics of superfluidity has been studied. We extend such universal properties by considering superfluid-insulator transition with an even integer number of fermions per unit cell. The resulting insulator interpolates between a band insulator of fermions and a Mott insulator of fermion pairs.
In this work, we consider NNN-fold degenerate DDD-dimensional electron gas with spherical Fermi surface and arbitrary forward-scattering density-density interaction transferring small momentum compared to the Fermi momentum kFk_{\mathrm{F}}kF​. The dimensional reduction that is mathematically equivalent to the Haldane patch construction and similar multidimensional bosonization techniques, provides a natural map of two-point DDD-dimensional correlation functions (fermion Green function, susceptibilities etc.) onto effective one-dimensional (1D) correlators with the same diagrammatic structure, which can be evaluated exactly within a 1D bosonizable (Gaussian) theory. We then apply this formalism to evaluate the fermion Green function, pair and charge/flavor susceptibilities, as well as the composite correlation functions for the case of a finite-range interaction, where the interaction range Rs≫1/kFR_{\mathrm{s}} \gg 1/k_{\mathrm{F}}Rs​≫1/kF​ is large compared to the Fermi wavelength. First, we find that the single-particle spectral function remains Fermi-liquid-like which is fully consistent with the previous research. In contrast to the single-particle sector, the many-body channels are efficiently dressed by finite-range interactions, and this dressing is fully equivalent to the one-loop renormalization group (RG), which is also in line with previous multidimensional bosonization results. Within the forward-scattering model, stable long-range order is not possible, and relevant susceptibilities demonstrate singular power-law scaling with temperature TTT at T→0T \to 0T→0. The rest of the abstract is in the PDF.
The aim of this thesis it to contribute to three open problems in the theory of itinerant electron systems in two spatial dimensions. Firstly, the mechanism for charge density wave formation in the transition metal dichalcogenides is a debated subject. In this thesis it is shown that charge density wave formation is possible via a purely electronic mechanism in monolayer vanadium diselenide. The competition of superconductivity and density wave formation is taken into account using the renormalisation group. As the Fermi surface is tuned to perfect nesting, a charge density wave phase emerges when the Heisenberg exchange interaction is of the order of the contact Coulomb repulsion. Secondly, the search for materials which exhibit topological superconductivity is ongoing. Possible candidates are strongly spin-orbit-coupled metals. In this thesis a square-lattice Hubbard model with strong Rashba spin-orbit coupling and one of the Fermi surfaces close to a Lifshitz transition is examined. The metal is shown to be generically unstable to the formation of mixed-parity superconductivity with a helical triplet component via a renormalisation group analysis. Thirdly, the breakdown of Fermi liquid theory close to a quantum critical point is still not well understood. In this thesis a functional renormalisation group analysis is presented using a soft frequency cutoff, investigating a general class of Pomeranchuk instabilities with 𝑁_𝑏 flavours of boson. At small 𝑁_𝑏 the theory is characterised by weakly non-Fermi-liquid behaviour of the electrons and 𝑧≈2 dynamics for the order parameter fluctuations. For large 𝑁_𝑏, the theory crosses over to 𝑧≈1 scaling and non-Fermi-liquid behaviour.