The Holstein Hamiltonian describes fermions hopping on a lattice and interacting locally with dispersionless phonon degrees of freedom. In the low-density limit, dressed quasiparticles, polarons and bipolarons, propagate with an effective mass. At higher densities, pairs can condense into a low-temperature superconducting phase and, at or near commensurate filling on a bipartite lattice, to charge density wave (CDW) order. CDW formation breaks a discrete symmetry and hence occurs via a second-order (Ising) transition and therefore at a finite
Tcdw in two dimensions. Quantum Monte Carlo calculations have determined
Tcdw for a variety of geometries, including square, honeycomb, and Lieb lattices. The superconducting transition, on the other hand, in
d=2 is in the Kosterlitz-Thouless universality class and is much less well characterized. In this paper we determine
Tsc for the square lattice for several values of the density $\ensuremath{\rho}$ and phonon frequency ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{0}$. We find that quasilong-range order sets in at ${T}_{\mathrm{sc}}\ensuremath{\lesssim}t/20$, where
t is the near-neighbor hopping amplitude, consistent with previous rough estimates from simulations which extrapolated to only the temperatures we reach from considerably higher
T. We also show evidence of a discontinuous evolution of the density as the CDW transition is approached at half filling.
We investigate superconductivity in a quasi-one-dimensional bipolaron system with random potentials, treating the interchain Josephson couplings in the mean-field approximation. The model is transformed into the S=(1/2 XXZ-spin chain with random fields along the z axis and the ordering field along the x axis. Using the quantum transfer-matrix method by the Suzuki-Trotter formula, we calculate the order parameter and the rigidity as functions of the temperature, the mean strength of the random fields, and the ordering field. We obtain the two-parameter scaling laws for these quantities. We also discuss these scaling relations by using the cumulant expansion in the phase Hamiltonian. This analytical method is extended to the more general models of one-dimensional interacting electrons, and the generalized susceptibilities for various long-range orderings are discussed in the light of the scaling laws.
We present quantum Monte Carlo results for a two-dimensional electron-phonon model. At half filling, a Peierls--charge-density-wave (CDW) instability dominates the behavior of the system and suppresses superconductivity. The CDW structure factor scales with system size and is consistent with a finite-size Ising-like scaling analysis which we use to estimate
Tc for the Peierls-CDW transition. Away from half filling, the Monte Carlo calculations show superconducting pairing in an s-wave channel, with a peak in the pair field susceptibility near a region in which there are strong Peierls-CDW correlations.
We investigate the effects of the randomness and electron-electron interactions on the competition between superconductivity and charge density wave in one-dimensional bipolaron system in the half-filled case at finite temperatures. The model is transformed into the S =1/2 XXZ-chain with random fields, and we carry out the numerical simulation using the transfer matrix by Suzuki-Trotter formula. When the interaction between neighboring bipolarons is attractive, the suppression of the correlation functions is described by the scaling law. This result is discussed in connection with the Fukuyama-Lee length including the quantum fluctuations. When the interaction is repulsive, weak randomness suppresses the charge density wave and enhances the superconductivity, but strong randomness suppresses both.
We provide a quasi-one-dimensional model which can support a pair-density-wave (PDW) state, in which the superconducting (SC) order parameter modulates periodically in space, with gapless Bogoliubov quasiparticle excitations. The model consists of an array of strongly interacting one-dimensional systems, where the one-dimensional systems are coupled to each other by local interactions and tunneling of the electrons and Cooper pairs between them. Within the interchain mean-field theory, we find several SC states from the model, including a conventional uniform SC state, PDW SC state, and a coexisting phase of the uniform SC and PDW states. In this quasi-1D regime we can treat the strong correlation physics essentially exactly using bosonization methods and the crossover to the 2D system by means of interchain mean-field theory. The resulting critical temperatures of the SC phases generically exhibit a power-law scaling with the coupling constants of the array, instead of the essential singularity found in weak-coupling BCS-type theories. Electronic excitations with an open Fermi surface, which emerge from the electronic Luttinger liquid systems below their crossover temperature to the Fermi liquid, are then coupled to the SC order parameters via the proximity effect. From the Fermi surface thus coupled to the SC order parameters, we calculate the quasiparticle spectrum in detail. We show that the quasiparticle spectrum can be fully gapped or nodal in the uniform SC phase and also in the coexisting phase of the uniform SC and PDW parameters. In the pure PDW state, the excitation spectrum has a reconstructed Fermi surface in the form of Fermi pockets of Bogoliubov quasiparticles.
We study the effects of anharmonicity on the physics of the Holstein model, which describes the coupling of itinerant fermions and localized quantum phonons, by introducing a quartic term in the phonon potential energy. We find that the presence of this anharmonic term reduces the extent of the charge density wave (CDW) phase at half-filling as well as the transition temperature to this phase. Doping away from half-filling, we observe a first-order phase transition between the CDW and a homogeneous phase which is also present in the harmonic model. In addition, we study the evolution of the superconducting susceptibility in the doped region and show that anharmonicity can enhance the superconducting response.