The so-called minimal models of unconventional superconductivity are lattice models of interacting electrons derived from materials in which electron pairing arises from purely repulsive interactions. Showing unambiguously that a minimal model actually can have a superconducting ground state remains a challenge at nonperturbative interactions. We make a significant step in this direction by computing ground states of the 2D U-V Hubbard model---the minimal model of the quasi-1D superconductors---by parallelized DMRG, which allows for systematic control of any bias and that is sign-problem-free. Using distributed-memory supercomputers and leveraging the advantages of the U-V model, we can treat unprecedented sizes of 2D strips and extrapolate their spin gap both to zero approximation error and the thermodynamic limit. Our results for the spin gap are shown to be compatible with a spin excitation spectrum that is either fully gapped or has zeros only in discrete points, and conversely that a Fermi liquid or magnetically ordered ground state is incompatible with them. Coupled with the enhancement to short-range correlations that we find exclusively in the
dxy pairing channel, this allows us to build an indirect case for the ground state of this model having superconducting order in the full 2D limit, and ruling out the other main possible phases, magnetic orders, and Fermi liquids.
We discuss the mechanisms of unconventional superconductivity and superfluidity in 3D and 2D fermionic systems with purely repulsive interaction at low densities. We construct phase diagrams of these systems and find the areas of the superconducting state in free space, as well as on the lattice in the framework of the Fermi-gas model with hard-core repulsion, the Hubbard model, the Shubin-Vonsovsky model, and the
t−J model. We demonstrate that the critical superconducting temperature can be greatly increased in the spin-polarized case or in a two-band situation already at low densities. The proposed theory is based on the Kohn-Luttinger mechanism or its generalizations and explains or predicts anomalous
p-,
d-, and
f-wave pairing in various materials, such as high-temperature superconductors, the idealized monolayer and bilayer of doped graphene, heavy-fermion systems, layered organic superconductors, superfluid
3He, spin-polarized
3He mixtures in
4He, ultracold quantum gases in magnetic traps, and optical lattices.
Two unrelated problems can be reduced to a model of a Bose gas interacting with a gauge field: (i) the effect of thermal fluctuations on a system of vortices in bulk superconductors in fields
Hc1\ensuremath{\ll}H\ensuremath{\ll}
Hc2, and (ii) charged, spinless excitations in two-dimensional (2D) strongly correlated electron systems. Both problems are important for the theory of high-temperature superconductors. We study this model in three regimes: at finite temperatures, assuming that the gauge field is purely transverse; at T=0, for the purely static (2D Coulomb) interaction; and at T=0, for a weak Coulomb interaction and a strong transverse one. Transverse interactions suppress the temperature of the superfluid transition significantly. A sufficiently strong transvese interaction is shown to produce a phase separation as the temperature decreases (in the absence of Coulomb repulsion). If there is Coulomb repulsion, the ground state does not have off-diagonal long-range order but the superfluid density is not zero unless the Coulomb constant exceeds a critical value. Sufficiently strong coupling to the transverse field destroys superfluidity as well. In the normal state formed at large couplings, the translational invariance is intact. We propose a bosonic ground state that is not superfluid at T=0. We discuss the implications of these results both for vortex liquids and strongly correlated electron systems.