We investigate the pairing tendencies in the hole-doped Haldane spin-1 chain. To allow for doping, we extend the original spin chain Hamiltonian into a fermionic model involving a two-orbital Hubbard chain at intermediate or strong repulsive interaction strengths
U and for degenerate orbitals. At half filling and large
U, the ferromagnetic Hund's coupling,
JH, generates effective spin-1 moments, with antiferromagnetic correlations between sites. Using large-scale density matrix renormalization group calculations, we accurately study the system's behavior under light hole-doping. For
U=1.6 in units of the noninteracting bandwidth and for ${J}_{\mathrm{H}}/U\ensuremath{\gtrsim}0.275$, we find that singlet pairing dominates the long-distance physics, establishing this system as a promising platform for repulsively mediated superconductivity. We provide concrete examples of materials that could realize the physics described here. We also provide evidence that the system approaches a Luther-Emery liquid state at large system sizes, reminiscent of the behavior of doped one-orbital two-leg ladders at weak coupling, which also have superconducting tendencies. The numerically calculated central charge approaches one in the thermodynamic limit, indicating a single gapless mode as is expected for the Luther-Emery state. Exponents characterizing the power-law decays of singlet pair-pair and charge density-density correlations are determined, and found to approximately satisfy the Luther-Emery identity.
We have numerically investigated the doped t-J ladder using exact diagonalization. We have studied both the limit of strong interchain coupling and isotropic coupling. The ladder scales to the Luther-Emery liquid regime in the strong interchain coupling limit. In this strong coupling limit there is a simple picture of the excitation spectrum that can be continued to explain the behavior at isotropic coupling. At J=0 we have indications of a ferromagnetic ground state. At a large J/t the ladder is phase separated into holes and a Heisenberg ladder. At intermediate coupling the ground state shows hole pairing with a modified d-wave symmetry. The excitation spectrum separates into a limited number of quasiparticles which carry charge +\ensuremath{\Vert}e\ensuremath{\Vert} and spin 1/2 and a triplet magnon mode. At half filling the former vanish but the latter evolves continuously into the magnon band of the spin liquid. At low doping the quasiparticles form a dilute Fermi gas with a strong attraction but simultaneously the Fermi wave vector, as would be measured in photoemission, is large. The dynamical structure factors are calculated and are found to be very similar to calculations on two-dimensional clusters. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
We reconsider some of the previous studies of the interactions between the holes and the spin background in the Hubbard model in the small-doping limit. We show that the hole-hole interaction due to the transverse magnetization fluctuations (i.e., spin waves) is finite at arbitrarily small hole density. It may be comparable to the coupling due to the longitudinal magnetization fluctuations (which are the essence of the ``spin-bag'' mechanism of Schrieffer, Wen, and Zhang). This suggests that the two couplings should be considered simultaneously when studying the phase diagram of the lightly doped quantum antiferromagnets at the values of U/t relevant to the high-
Tc superconducting materials. We also show that in the large-(U/t) limit the Hubbard-model expressions for the coupling of holes reduce to those given by Shraiman and Siggia for the t-J model. This provides a link between the weak- and the strong-coupling theories of the doped quantum antiferromagnets, in the small-doping limit.