Phase transitions involving spontaneous time-reversal symmetry breaking are studied on the honeycomb lattice at finite hole doping with next-nearest-neighbor repulsion. We derive an exact expression for the mean-field equation of state in closed form, valid at temperatures much less than the Fermi energy. Contrary to standard expectations, we find that thermally induced intraband particle-hole excitations can create and stabilize a uniform metallic phase with broken time-reversal symmetry as the temperature is raised in a region where the ground state is a trivial metal.
Superconductivity in the strongly correlated electronic systems described by the Hubbard model for slightly less than half-filled band is shown to arise from the condensation of charge + e holons which are bosons. The holon effective mass is found to be very close to that of the band electrons and they have a strong nearest neighbour repulsion induced by the spin fluctuations. They interact with an U(1) part of the collective SU(2) gauge field (named S-gauge field) of the spin system. This results in spontaneous symmetry breaking of the holon field and the appearance of the Anderson-Higgs phenomenon. The interesting possibility of the SU(2) gauge field-spinon coupled system retaining some gapless excitation spectrum inspite of the spontaneous symmetry breaking in the holon field is pointed out.
Recently, we have numerically evaluated the current-current correlation function for the ground states of three-band models for the CuO planes of high-
Tc superconductors at hole doping
x=1∕8 using systems with 24 sites and periodic boundary conditions. In this paper, the numerical analysis is extended to a wider range of parameters. Our results show no evidence for the time-reversal symmetry violating current patterns recently proposed by Varma [C. M. Varma, Phys. Rev. B 73, 155113 (2006)]. If such current patterns exist, our results indicate that the energy associated with the loop currents must be smaller than
5meV per link even if the on-site chemical potential on the oxygen sites, which is generally assumed to be of the order of ${ϵ}_{\mathrm{p}}\ensuremath{-}{ϵ}_{\mathrm{d}}=3.6\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\mathrm{eV}$, is taken to 1.8, 0.9, 0.4, and finally
0eV. The current-current correlations remain virtually unaffected as we increase the interatomic Coulomb repulsion
Vpd, the term driving the system into the current carrying phase in Varma's analysis, from
1.2to2.4eV. Assuming that the three-band models are adequate, quantum critical fluctuations of such patterns hence cannot be responsible for phenomena occurring at significantly higher energies, such as superconductivity or the anomalous properties of the pseudogap phase. We further derive an upper bound for the magnetic moment per unit cell from the upper bound we obtain for spontaneous currents, and find it smaller than the magnetic moment measured in a recent neutron scattering experiment. In this context, we observe that if the observed magnetic moments were due to a current pattern, the magnitude of these currents would be insufficient to determine the phase diagram. Finally, we discuss the role of finite size effects in our numerical experiments. In particular, we show that the net spin
1∕2 of our finite size ground states does not infringe on the validity of our conclusions.
Since the discovery of the superconducting cuprates and their hitherto unknown electronic properties there has been a continuously growing interest in a theoretical treatment of suitable models of strongly correlated fermions which at least qualitatively reflect the essential aspects of these physical systems. The Hubbard model in two dimensions plays an important role in this context. The present thesis examines instabilities and possible symmetry broken phases of the two-dimensional repulsive Hubbard model with the help of numeric and semi analytic methods. While in the first part it is pointed out how such instabilities can be treated by a mean field theory, the second part of the work supplies the theoretical bases of the numeric procedures developed in part III. For the case of a pure nearest neighbour hopping it is shown that the second order contributions of perturbation theory generate an effective attraction between the electrons. The energy scale of the superconducting instabilities is also examined; it is shown that the vanHove singularity drastically enhances this critical scale at half filling. The investigation of a possible coexistence of two different kinds of spontaneous symmetry breaking forms the emphasis of the thesis: Lately accomplished renormalization group calculations showed (for suitably chosen parameters) the occurrence of a Pomeranchuk instability of the two-dimensional Hubbard model with nonvanishing next nearest neighbour hopping, which should give rise to a ground state that spontaneously breaks the model's lattice symmetry as well as its U(1) symmetry, i.e. the ground state could be characterized by two co-existing order parameters. For treatment of the problem of co-existing instabilities the ansatz of a renormalized perturbation theory is used, which had been suggested in order to avoid the occurrence of unphysical singularities arising within the framework of naive perturbation theory; these singularities are related to interaction-induced shifts of the Fermi surface, which cannot be captured by simply shifting the chemical potential. The attractive Hubbard model is also treated within the framework of renormalized perturbation theory; the well-known reduction of the superconducting order parameter with respect to its BCS value reported in earlier investigations can be confirmed. A spontaneously broken lattice symmetrie does not arise here, in contrast to the repulsive case.
As a minimal fermionic model with kinetic frustration, we study a system of spinless fermions in the lowest band of a triangular lattice with nearest-neighbor repulsion. We find that the combination of interactions and kinetic frustration leads to spontaneous symmetry breaking in various ways. Time-reversal symmetry can be broken by two types of loop current patterns, a chiral one and one that breaks the translational lattice symmetry. Moreover, the translational symmetry can also be broken by a density wave forming a kagome pattern or by a Peierls-type trimerization characterized by enhanced correlations among the sites of certain triangular plaquettes (giving a plaquette-centered density wave). We map out the phase diagram as it results from leading-order Ginzburg-Landau mean-field theory. Several experimental realizations of the type of system under study are possible with ultracold atoms in optical lattices.
We study the stability of the time-reversal symmetry breaking staggered-flux phase of a single band Hubbard model, within the variational cluster approach. For intermediate and small values of the interaction
U, we find metastable solutions for the staggered-flux phase, with a maximum current per bond at $U\ensuremath{\approx}3.2$. However, allowing for antiferromagnetic and superconducting long-range order it turns out that in the region at and close to half filling the antiferromagnetic phase is the most favorable energetically. The effect of nearest-neighbor interaction is also considered. Our results show that a negative nearest-neighbor interaction and finite doping favors the stability of the staggered-flux phase. We also present preliminary results for the three-band Hubbard model obtained with a restricted set of variational parameters. For this case, no spontaneous time-reversal symmetry breaking phase is found in our calculations.