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.
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.
This thesis deals with different aspects of high temperature superconductivity in hole-doped cuprates. We assume the t - J model to describe the CuO2 planes of cuprates and we use a spin-charge gauge approach with spin-charge separation to describe holes in terms of a spinless fermion carrying the charge (holon) and a neutral boson carrying spin 1/2 (spinon), coupled by a slave-particle gauge field. In this framework we consider the effects of the presence of a finite density of incoherent holon pairs in the normal state as a precursor of superconductivity. We show that it is possible to take such pairs into account through a strongly direction dependent spectral weight for holons, which suppresses quasi-particles starting from the anti-nodal directions, and a wave function renormalization for the slave particle gauge field. In this way we prove that, when temperature is reduced, the formation of holon pairs causes both the deviation from linearity of the resistivity and the deviation from the constant value of the Knight shift. Moreover we point out the need for a negative next-nearest-neighbor hopping term ((t - t' - J model) to get a good continuum limit and to evaluate the Knight shift. These results are obtained through a Green's function, which follows naturally from the formalism and analytically interpolates between a Fermi liquid-like behavior and a d-wave superconductor when the coherence length of the holon pair order parameter is increased. The system preserves a finite Fermi surface until the superconducting transition, where it reduces to four nodes. Finally when, at lower temperatures, both the holon pairs and the RVB spinon pairs condense we enter the superconducting phase. In this phase we study the magnetic excitations showing how to extend to spin waves the hourglass-shape dispersion, found for spinons near the antiferromagnetic vector, if a suitable local mechanism of attraction between spinon and anti-spinon is assumed. The resulting spin wave Green's function, whose imaginary part is directly comparable with experiments, generates the hourglass with a finite gap between the two branches. Since the U(1) slave-particle gauge field gains mass in the superconducting phase via Anderson-Higgs mechanism, we propose the necessary mechanism of attraction comes from the unbroken Z2 subgroup of the U(1) gauge group.
In the ionic Hubbard model, the on-site repulsion U, which drives a Mott insulator, and the ionic potential V, which drives a band insulator, compete with each other to open up a window of charge fluctuations when $U\ensuremath{\sim}V$. We study this model on square and cubic lattices in the limit of large U and V, with $V\ensuremath{\sim}U$. Using an effective Hamiltonian and a slave-boson approach with both doublons and holons, we find that the system undergoes a phase transition as a function of V from an antiferromagnetic Mott insulator to a paramagnetic insulator with strong singlet correlations, which is driven by a condensate of ``neutral'' doublon-holon pairs. On further increasing V, the system undergoes another phase transition to a superconducting phase driven by condensate of ``charged'' doublons and holons. The superfluid phase, characterized by the presence of a coherent (but gapped) fermionic quasiparticle and hc/e flux quantization, has a high ${T}_{c}\ensuremath{\sim}t$, which shows a dome-shaped behavior as a function of V. The paramagnetic insulator phase has a deconfined U(1) gauge field and associated gapless photon excitations. We also discuss how these phases can be detected in the ultracold-atom context.
The discovery of high temperature superconductivity inspired a number of novel proposals, one of which, put forward by C.M.Varma, involves the breaking of time-reversal symmetry to explain the physics of the underdoped pseudogap phase. It was proposed that time-reversal symmetry is spontaneously broken as a result of strong repulsion between the Cu-O electrons to form loop-currents in the system. In this work, we developed a general theory to study the quantum phase transitions in the 2 dimensional strongly interacting electronic systems in which time-reversal symmetry is spontaneously broken in the ground state. We first applied the theory of magnetic groups to identify electronic current-loop patterns in two physically relevant systems: (i) 2-band model involving spinless electrons on a honeycomb lattice with next-nearest-neighbor interactions; (ii) 3-band CuO2 model with and without lattice distortions. Next, by examining the correlation function within the standard ring and ladder Dyson series approximations, we identify the effective Hamiltonian with the relevant interactions responsible for creating low-energy fluctuations near the quantum critical point. The mean-field analysis of this effective Hamiltonian elucidated the fact that time-reversal symmetry breaking in a 2-band model is in the same universality class as the interband particle-hole pair condensation instability which occurs in the semi-conductors under large enough particle-hole attraction. Using Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation and functional integral method, we are able to investigate this instability and the static susceptibility in the condensed phase both in half-filling and doped case. Away from half-filling, because the condensates are metallic and couple to the gapless collective intraband particle-hole excitations, we find that the static susceptibility is generically negative as a result of this coupling, which implies that the condensates are unstable.
We propose one possible mechanism for an anomalous metallic phase appearing frequently in two spatial dimensions, that is, local pairing fluctuations. Introducing a pair-rotor representation to decompose bare electrons into collective pairing excitations and renormalized electrons, we derive an SU(2) gauge theory of the Hubbard model as an extended version of its U(1) gauge theory. Since our effective SU(2) gauge theory admits two kinds of collective bosons corresponding to pair excitations and density fluctuations, respectively, an intermediate phase appears naturally between the spin liquid Mott insulator and Fermi liquid metal of the U(1) gauge theory, characterized by softening of density-fluctuation modes as the Fermi liquid, but gapping of pair-excitation modes. We show that this intermediate phase is identified with an anomalous metallic phase because there are no electronlike quasiparticles although it is metallic.
High temperature superconductivity in copper oxides (cuprates) represents one of the most striking phenomena in condensed matter physics. These materials host superconducting states with the highest known critical temperatures, emerging upon doping antiferromagnetic insulator compounds. The antiferromagnetic (AF) insulating and superconducting (SC) phases defy standard descriptions in terms of band picture and conventional phonon-mediated superconductivity. In fact, these phenomena are genuine signatures of strong electronic correlations which hinder effective single-particle descriptions of the many-electron system. After 40 years since their discovery, it is widely accepted that the Hubbard model on the square lattice provides a minimal description of the low-energy electronic properties of cuprates. The model describes the competition between the electronic kinetic energy, modelled by nearest-neighbours hopping t, and the Coulomb repulsion, modelled by a purely local interaction potential U. At half-filling, this competition results in the so-called "Mott localisation" phenomenon, which distinguishes the metallic phase for U/t « 1 from an insulating phase for U/t » 1. The latter is characterised by the almost complete localisation of electrons due to the high energetic cost of hopping towards occupied sites. Interestingly, this basic competition is intimately related to AF ordering and, upon doping, to the formation of the SC state with characteristic d-wave symmetry. The fact that a purely repulsive interaction U is responsible for the formation of a SC state is remarkable, being superconductivity typically associated with an effective attractive interaction. In fact, a d-wave SC state can also be obtained, in general, by considering an attractive potential between electrons of neighbouring sites. Motivated by this observation, in this thesis, we study a modified version of the Hubbard model, dubbed as the "extended Hubbard model", in which we include a nearest-neighbours attractive potential -V. The general goal of this work is to explore the interplay between the purely local repulsion and the non-local attraction. This is not only motivated by the fact that both interactions are, in principle, responsible for d-wave superconductivity, but also by recent experimental observations which strongly suggest that the term -V needs to be included in order to accurately describe the magnetic spectra of some specific compounds. In this thesis, we study the extended Hubbard model using the Hartree-Fock method. Namely, we approximate the ground state by implementing a variational search in the subspace of the many-body Hilbert space of gaussian states. Despite its simplicity, the Hartree-Fock method provides a powerful framework to study competition among different phases, originating from different symmetry breaking mechanisms. In particular, we study the competition between three different phases: the normal phase, characterised by no symmetry breaking, the AF phase, characterised by a lowering of SU(2) symmetry, and the SC phase, characterised by the breaking of U(1) charge conservation. This thesis work led to a number of original results, which can be summarised by the general observation that the non-local attraction -V acts cooperatively with the local repulsion U for the stabilisation of the various phases hosted by the Hubbard model. For the normal phase, we find that the non-local attraction acts as a source of Mott localisation, leading to an effective reduction of the electronic bandwidth. In particular, for values of V larger than a critical value and close to half-filling, we find a strong Mott localisation characterised by the complete flattening of the electronic bands. Interestingly, this result shows an example of Mott localisation that can be described at the level of the Hartree-Fock approximation, whereas Mott localisation in the conventional Hubbard model usually requires more sophisticated approximation schemes. For the AF phase, we restrict our analysis to the half-filled case. We find that the pairing-induced Mott localisation leads to a significant enhancement of the magnetisation, primarily originating from the local repulsion U. Finally, we focus on the superconducting phase and derive self-consistency equations in both singlet and triplet Cooper pairing channels, showing how Cooper pairing can be mediated simultaneously by both the local repulsion and the non-local attraction. Therefore, we numerically investigate the singlet channel and find evidence of "symmetry mixing", namely, the formation of a superconducting gap that is neither symmetric nor anti-symmetric under rotations of π/2 in the plane. We show that symmetry mixing is connected to the emergence of a finite nematic order parameter, that signals the breaking of planar rotational symmetry. This nematic symmetry breaking results in the fact that the renormalisation of bands becomes anisotropic, producing a difference in electronic kinetics in the x and y directions. To summarise, the original results obtained in this thesis show that the non-local pairing provides a different route towards the formation of key strongly correlated phenomena, including Mott localisation and nematic superconductivity, and call for future investigation using more sophisticated methods such as, for example, the Dynamical Mean Field Theory.
The spin-rotationally invariant SU(2)×U(1) approach to the Hubbard model is extended to accommodate the charge degrees of freedom.Both U(1) and SU(2) gauge transformation are used to factorize the charge and spin contribution to the original electron operator in terms of the emergent gauge elds.By tracing out gauge bosons the form of paired states is established and the role of antiferromagnetic correlations is explicated.We argue that in strongly correlated electron system collective instanton excitations of the phase eld (dual to the charge) arise with a great degree of stability, governed by gauge ux changes by an integer multiple of 2π.Furthermore, it is shown that U(1) and SU(2) gauge elds play a similar role as phonons in the BCS theory: they act as the the "glue" for fermion pairing.