The interplay between spin and charge degrees of freedom arising from doping a Mott insulating quantum spin liquid (QSL) has been a topic of research for several decades. Calculating properties of these fractionalized metallic states in single-band models are generally restricted to mean-field patron descriptions and small fluctuations around these states, which are insufficient for quantitative comparison of observables to measurements performed in strongly-correlated systems. In this work, we numerically study a class of correlated electronic wavefunctions which support fractionalized spin and charge excitations and which fully take into account gauge fluctuations through the enforcement of local Hilbert space constraints. By optimizing the energy of these wavefunctions against the hole-doped Fermi Hubbard Hamiltonian, we obtain a variational ansatz for describing the low-energy physics of this model. We compare measurements of hole-induced spin-spin correlation functions to measurements taken in low temperature cold-atom simulations of the Hubbard model and find quantitative agreement between the two. In particular, we demonstrate the emergence of magnetic polaron correlations in these metallic states.
The interplay between spin and charge degrees of freedom arising from doping a Mott insulating quantum spin liquid (QSL) has been a topic of research for several decades. Calculating properties of these fractionalized metallic states in single-band models are generally restricted to mean-field patron descriptions and small fluctuations around these states, which are insufficient for quantitative comparison of observables to measurements performed in strongly-correlated systems. In this work, we numerically study a class of correlated electronic wavefunctions which support fractionalized spin and charge excitations and which fully take into account gauge fluctuations through the enforcement of local Hilbert space constraints. By optimizing the energy of these wavefunctions against the hole-doped Fermi Hubbard Hamiltonian, we obtain a variational ansatz for describing the low-energy physics of this model. We compare measurements of hole-induced spin-spin correlation functions to measurements taken in low temperature cold-atom simulations of the Hubbard model and find quantitative agreement between the two. In particular, we demonstrate the emergence of magnetic polaron correlations in these metallic states.
The competition between antiferromagnetism and hole motion in two-dimensional Mott insulators lies at the heart of a doping-dependent transition from an anomalous metal to a conventional Fermi liquid. We observe such a crossover in Fermi-Hubbard systems on a cold-atom quantum simulator and reveal the transformation of multipoint correlations between spins and holes upon increasing doping at temperatures around the superexchange energy. Conventional observables, such as spin susceptibility, are furthermore computed from the microscopic snapshots of the system. Starting from a magnetic polaron regime, we find the system evolves into a Fermi liquid featuring incommensurate magnetic fluctuations and fundamentally altered correlations. The crossover is completed for hole dopings around 30%. Our work benchmarks theoretical approaches and discusses possible connections to lower-temperature phenomena.
The complex interplay between charge and spin dynamics lies at the heart of strongly correlated quantum materials, and it is a fundamental topic in basic research with far-reaching technological perspectives. We explore in this paper the dynamics of holes in a single-band, extended t - J model where the background spins form a Z 2 quantum spin liquid. Using a field theory approach based on a parton construction, we show that while the electrons for most momenta fractionalize into uncorrelated charge-carrying holons and spin-carrying spinons as generally expected for a quantum spin liquid, the spinon-holon scattering cross section diverges for certain momenta, signaling strong correlations. By deriving an effective low-energy Hamiltonian describing this dynamics, we demonstrate that these divergences are due to the formation of long-lived spinon-holon bound states. Since the wave function of these bound states is localized over a few lattice sites, they correspond to well-defined fermions with the same charge and spin as the underlying electrons. We then show that quantum gas microscopy with atoms in optical lattices provides an excellent platform for verifying and probing the internal spatial structure of these emerging fermions. The fermions will furthermore show up as clear quasiparticle peaks in angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy with an intensity determined by their internal structure. For a nonzero hole concentration, the fermions form hole pockets with qualitatively the same location, shape, and intensity variation in the Brillouin zone as the so-called Fermi arcs observed in the pseudogap phase. Such agreement is remarkable since the Fermi arcs arise from the delicate interplay between the symmetry of the quantum spin liquid and the internal structure of the emerging fermions in a minimal single-band model with no extra degrees of freedom added. Our results, therefore, provide a microscopic mechanism for the conjectured fractionalized Fermi liquid and open up new pathways for exploring the pseudogap phase and high-temperature superconductivity as arising from a quantum spin liquid.
The Fermi liquid theory is a central concept in modern condensed matter physics used to describe conventional metals. A state of this universality class consists of well-defined quasiparticles, which occupy a finite number of states within a Fermi volume defined in momentum space. According to the Luttinger’s theorem, such a state encloses a Fermi volume proportional to the electron density modulo the filled bands if no symmetry is broken. In the past decades strong deviations from Fermi liquid theory have been observed in the scaling behavior of thermodynamic observables in different materials, among which are for instance cuprates and iron pnictides. This thesis is about two prototypical systems that can not be described by Fermi liquid theory. The first part of this work investigates two-dimensional effective models, which are in a Mott insulating state at half-filling and have a finite conductivity when doped with holes. In such a Mott insulating state, the charge carriers are strongly localized due to the Coulomb repulsion. Hence, strong correlations are assumed to have a strong impact on the formation of the ground state, also in the regime of small hole concentration. In a first project we have used a so-called spinon dopon mean-field theory to represent the two-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model with strong on-site repulsive interaction in effective degrees of freedom, in which the holes can be embedded into a quantum spin liquid. The corresponding SU(2) invariant ground state belongs to the class of fractionalized Fermi liquids. In a second project we investigate a quantum dimer model, an effective model based on a Hilbert space spanned by short range singlets and bound states of holes and spins. The focus here is on the calculation of the hole-part of the electron spectral function by using exact diagonalization and its comparison with two analytic methods, a diagrammatic computation based on the Bethe-Salpeter equation and a so-called two-mode approximation. The electron spectral function shows a similar analytic form in momentum space between nodal and antinodal point when compared to results from photoemission spectroscopy experiments on cuprates. Furthermore, in a subsequent work we calculate the exact ground state of the quantum dimer model along a certain parameter line. In order to analyze the behavior of the elctron spectral function when increasing the density of holes, we investigate the Fermi-Hubbard model in a current project using a dynamical mean-field approach. To solve the 4-site cluster impurity problem, we use a numerical renormalization group approach. However, numerical limitations force us to restrict the analysis to spin-polarized baths. According to the spectral data, the system is similar to the SU(2) invariant case at half-filling in a Mott insulating state and posseses a momentum-selective energy gap at finite doping. The topology of the Fermi surface shows a Lifshitz transition when increasing the hole concentration. Here, the curvature of the Fermi surface changes from electron- to hole-like. For comparison we apply the dynamical mean-field theory also to the quantum dimer model and observe that the electron spectral functions at finite doping are qualitatively similar to that of the two-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model. The second half of the work is about Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid theory, which is used to describe the low-energy effective degrees of freedom of one-dimensional systems. Here, we first discuss a conceptional extension of the operator-based bosonization theory for one-dimensional systems. This extension is especially suited for inhomogeneous one-dimensional systems. First, we investigate a one-dimensional system with a local interation potential and compute an exact solution of the single particle propagator at T = 0. The critical exponent of the single particle propagator has an unconventional form as a function of the microscopic Tomonaga-Luttinger parameters, which is not covered by the original Luttinger paradigm postulated by F. Duncan M. Haldane. In a second project on one-dimensional systems, we study the impact of scattering processes among bosonic low-energy excitations on the thermalization process. Such scattering processes are irrelevant on large length scales, however strongly affect the dynamics. In our analytic analysis we focus on a experimental setup, where a one-dimensional Bose gas is instantaneously splitted in two identical, however strongly correlated, halves of one-dimensional electronic systems. In the following, the corresponding non-equilibrium state runs through multiple regimes in time, such as a metastable prethermalization regime. However, above a certain threshold in time such scattering processes cause an effective thermalization of the system. In order to demonstrate this, we compute the kinetic equation in the Keldysh field integral formalism from a diagrammatic expansion based on a self-consistent Born approximation.
We employ a family of ancilla qubit variational wave functions [Y.-H. Zhang and S. Sachdev, Phys. Rev. Res. 2 , 023172 (2020)] to describe the polaronic correlations in the pseudogap metal phase of a hole-doped 2D Fermi–Hubbard model. Comparison to ultracold atom quantum simulator data [J. Koepsell et al ., Science 374 , 82 (2021)] reveals both qualitative and quantitative agreement with the numerical analysis from half-filling up to 80% hole-doping, capturing the crossover from the polaronic regime to the Fermi liquid observed around 40% doping.
Solid state physics, a very broad field in natural science, aims to explain physical properties of materials modeled as a many-body ensemble of the order of ∼ 10^23 interacting particles. For interacting metallic systems, one of the most powerful tools for unraveling the consequences of the collective interaction is the Fermi liquid theory. While still being an approximation, it excellently models many materials especially in the low-temperature and low-energy regime by treating themany-body problem as being equivalent to effectively non-interacting ”particles”, which is done by introducing the concept of quasiparticles. During the last few decades, several exotic phases of matter have been discovered, which originate from strong Coulomb interactions between the electrons, whose description is beyond the Fermi liquid theory. This thesis addresses the question of the validity of Fermi liquid theory once a single hole is introduced into an antiferromagnet with completely localized spins due to the strong interactions. Here, the most-studied case concerns the so-called 2D t − J model, which hosts a well-defined quasiparticle, the spin polaron. Focusing on a more tractable case, the t − Jz model without quantum spin fluctuations, we study the stability of the spin polaron solution once the nextnearest neighbor hopping t′ is introduced into the system. We focus on observations at the Γ-point and the X-point of systems with fixed Jz = 0.4t and varying t′ ∈ [−0.5t, 0.5t]. The model is numerically solved using exact diagonalization on finite-size lattices of up to 32 sites. A study of the quasiparticle weight under finite-size scaling reveals an “anomalous” regime at the Γ-point fort′ ≤ −0.3t, indicated by a vanishing quasiparticle weight. In order to characterize the low-energy dynamics within this “anomalous” regime, we investigated the spin correlation centered around the hole, as well as the magnon number distribution of a single-doped 20-site system. Based on the results, we present a preliminary picture of the antiferromagnetic ground state doped with one hole within that “anomalous” regime (t′ ≤ −0.3t) that deviates from the standard spin polaron as the cloud of magnetic fluctuations, typically localized around the hole, delocalizes over the whole finite-size lattice. Consequently, such systems show a weakly suppressed antiferromagnetic configuration under single-hole doping.
Spin and charge are two fundamental degrees of freedom in strongly correlated electron systems. In this thesis we study low-energy effective theory and phase transitions of spin and charge in a variety of strongly correlated systems. First, we study effective theory of magnetic phase transition in Sp(4) spin system and iron-based superconductors. Quantum phase transitions beyond Landau paradigm has been proposed in SU(2) spill model. We generalize this paradigm to Sp(4) model, which can be realized using spin-[special characters omitted] cold atoms on optical lattice. In iron-based superconductors, we study low-energy effective theory for magnetic and structural phase transitions, and present a global phase diagram of the two phase transitions. Second, we study spin and charge fluctuations on triangular lattice, and compare our results with experiments on organic Mott insulator κ-(ET) 2(CN)2. We show that the spin liquid state observed in experiments can be explained by Z2 spin liquid theory which contains spin-½ spinon and Z2 vison excitations. We also argue that near the Mott-insulator-to-metal transition there are fractionalized spinless charge excitations, which form exciton bound states near the transition. At last, we study spin and charge excitations in high-T c cuprates. We describe fluctuating two-dimensional metallic antiferromagnets by a gauge-theoretic description of an 'algebraic charge liquid' involving spinless fermions and a spin S = 1/2 complex scalar. We propose a phenomenological effective lattice Hamiltonian which describes the binding of these particles into gauge-neutral, electron-like excitations, and describe its implications for the electron spectral function across the entire Brillouin zone. We discuss connections of our results to photoemission experiments in the pseudogap regime of the cuprate superconductors.