We study superfluidity in strongly correlated systems by focusing three features as follows. First, interplay between superfluidity and other order parameters near quantum critical points is studied. The onset positions of the order parameters with or without superconductivity determines how they interact with each other. For the spin density wave (SDW) transition, we find that the quantum critical point shifts by order |∆|, where ∆ is pairing amplitude, so that the region of SDW order is smaller in the superconductor than in the metal. This shift is larger than the |∆|2 shift predicted by theories of competing orders which ignore Fermi surface effects. Second, we study a doped antiferromagnetic Mott insulator motivated by copper based high temperature superconductors. Based on spin and charge fractionalization, the algebraic charge liquid phase whose bosonic spinons have energy gap but fermionic holons form Fermi surfaces and its superconductivity are studied. We show fluctuations of local SDW order orientation lead to d-wave superconductivity, and its quantum critical pairing mechanisms are investigated. Also, a theory of bound states between spinons and holons is studied. We show that the fractionalization induces a doubling electron-like quasiparticles, which naturally induces the fractionalized Fermi liquid. The bound state theory describes exotic properties of the underdoped Cuprates such as “nodal-antinodal dichotomy” at a mean field level description. At last, we study superfluidity of fermions in optical lattices near the Feshbach resonance. Due to divergence of scattering length at the resonance, universality is observed and characteristics of superfluidity has been studied. We extend such universal properties by considering superfluid-insulator transition with an even integer number of fermions per unit cell. The resulting insulator interpolates between a band insulator of fermions and a Mott insulator of fermion pairs.
We study superfluidity in strongly correlated systems by focusing three features as follows. First, interplay between superfluidity and other order parameters near quantum critical points is studied. The onset positions of the order parameters with or without superconductivity determines how they interact with each other. For the spin density wave (SDW) transition, we find that the quantum critical point shifts by order |∆|, where ∆ is pairing amplitude, so that the region of SDW order is smaller in the superconductor than in the metal. This shift is larger than the |∆|2 shift predicted by theories of competing orders which ignore Fermi surface effects. Second, we study a doped antiferromagnetic Mott insulator motivated by copper based high temperature superconductors. Based on spin and charge fractionalization, the algebraic charge liquid phase whose bosonic spinons have energy gap but fermionic holons form Fermi surfaces and its superconductivity are studied. We show fluctuations of local SDW order orientation lead to d-wave superconductivity, and its quantum critical pairing mechanisms are investigated. Also, a theory of bound states between spinons and holons is studied. We show that the fractionalization induces a doubling electron-like quasiparticles, which naturally induces the fractionalized Fermi liquid. The bound state theory describes exotic properties of the underdoped Cuprates such as “nodal-antinodal dichotomy” at a mean field level description. At last, we study superfluidity of fermions in optical lattices near the Feshbach resonance. Due to divergence of scattering length at the resonance, universality is observed and characteristics of superfluidity has been studied. We extend such universal properties by considering superfluid-insulator transition with an even integer number of fermions per unit cell. The resulting insulator interpolates between a band insulator of fermions and a Mott insulator of fermion pairs.
We model the underdoped cuprates using fermions moving in a background with local antiferromagnetic order. The antiferromagnetic order fluctuates in orientation, but not in magnitude, so that there is no long-range antiferromagnetism, but a ``topological'' order survives. The normal state is described as a fractionalized Fermi liquid (FL*), with electronlike quasiparticles coupled to the fractionalized excitations of the fluctuating antiferromagnet. The electronic quasiparticles reside near pocket Fermi surfaces enclosing total area x (the dopant density), centered away from the magnetic Brillouin zone boundary. The violation of the conventional Luttinger theorem is linked to a ``species doubling'' of these quasiparticles. We describe phenomenological theories of the pairing of these quasiparticles, and show that a large class of mean-field theories generically displays a nodal-antinodal ``dichotomy'': The interplay of local antiferromagnetism and pairing leads to a small gap near the nodes of the d-wave pairing along the Brillouin zone diagonals, and a large gap in the antinodal region.
We discuss the appearance of quantum orders in the Hubbard model for interacting electrons, at half-filling. Such phases do not have local order parameters and need to be characterized by the quantum mechanical properties of their ground state. On one hand, we study the Mott transition from a metal to a spin liquid insulator in two dimensions, of potential relevance to some layered organic compounds. The correlation-driven transition occurs at fixed filling and involves fractionalization of the electron: upon entering the insulator, a Fermi surface of neutral spinons coupled to an internal gauge field emerges. We focus on the transport properties near the quantum critical point and find that the emergent gauge fluctuations play a key role in determining the universal scaling. Second, motivated by a class of three-dimensional transition metal oxides, the pyrochlore iridates, we study the interplay of non-trivial band topology and correlations. Building on the strong spin orbit coupling in these compounds, we construct a general microscopic Hubbard model and determine its mean-field phase diagram, which contains topological insulators, Weyl semimetals, axion insulators and various antiferromagnets. We also discuss the effects many-body correlations on theses phases. We close by examining a fractionalized topological insulator that combines the two main themes of the thesis: fractionalization and non-trivial band topology. Specifically, we study how the two-dimensional protected surface states of a topological Mott insulator interact with a three-dimensional emergent gauge field. Various correlation effects on observables are identified.
The pseudogap state of cuprate high-temperature superconductors has been often viewed as either a yet unknown competing order or a precursor state to superconductivity. While awaiting the resolution of the pseudogap problem in cuprates, we demonstrate that local pairing fluctuations, vortex liquid dynamics, and other precursor phenomena can emerge quite generally whenever fermionic excitations remain gapped across the superconducting transition, regardless of the gap origin. Our choice of a tractable model is a lattice band insulator with short-range attractive interactions between fermions in the s-wave channel. An effective crossover between Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) and Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) regimes can be identified in any band insulator above two dimensions, while in two dimensions only the BEC regime exists. The superconducting transition is ``unconventional'' (non-pair-breaking) in the BEC regime, identified by either the bosonic mean field or XY universality class. The insulator adjacent to the superconductor in the BEC regime is a bosonic Mott insulator of Cooper pairs, which may be susceptible to charge density wave ordering. We construct a function of the many-body excitation spectrum whose nonanalytic changes define a sharp distinction between band and Mott insulators. The corresponding ``second-order transition'' can be observed out of equilibrium by driving a Cooper pair laser in the Mott insulator. We explicitly show that the gap for charged bosonic excitations lies below the threshold for Cooper pair breakup in any BEC regime, despite quantum fluctuations. Our discussion ends with a view of possible consequences for cuprates, where antinodal pair dynamics has certain features in common with our simple s-wave picture.
In this thesis, symmetry and related transformation laws under a suitable unitary transformation are used in the study of the superconducting and magnetic properties of strongly correlated electronic systems. Such a study profits from a recently found global SO(3)×SO(3)×U(1) = [SO(4)×U(1)]/Z2 symmetry in the Hubbard model on a bipartite lattice. The introduction of the square-lattice quantum liquid relies on a general description of the Hubbard model consistent with its exact global SO(3) × SO(3) × U(1) symmetry. Such a quantum liquid is expected to play the same role for many-electron problems with short-range interactions on a square lattice, as a Fermi liquid for three-dimensional isotropic metals. It refers to the Hubbard model on the square lattice in the subspace spanned by the ground state, and the excited states generated by application onto it of one- and two-electron operators. For such a square-lattice quantum liquid only the charge c fermions and spin-neutral two-spinon s1 fermions play an active role. Part of the studies of this thesis use an effective superconductivity theory according to which, for zero spin density m = 0 and the range 0 < x < x∗ of finite hole concentrations of a short-range spin ordered phase, the ground state of the square-lattice quantum liquid of c and s1 fermions with residual interactions is superconducting. (For U/4t > ui ≈ 3/4 the critical hole concentration x∗ increases continuously upon increasing the U/4t value from x∗ = 1/√2 ≈ 0.225 at U/4t = ui to x∗ = 1/ ≈ 0.318 for U/4t → ∞.) Superconductivity emerges naturally from the effects of the residual interactions of the c and s1 fermions and as a side product of the short-range spin correlations. The phase of the c fermion pairs reads = 0 + 1 where the fluctuations of the phases 0 and 1 become large for x → 0 and x → x∗, respectively. For 0 < x < x∗ and x = 0, the symmetry of the action for the phase is a global superconducting U(1) symmetry and a local compact gauge symmetry, respectively. The former U(1) symmetry is identified with the U(1) symmetry of the Hubbard-model global SO(3) × SO(3) × U(1) = [SO(4) × U(1)]/Z2 symmetry. The amplitudes g = g0 g1, g0 = |heiθ0i|, and g1 = |heiθ1i|, their zero-temperature values ˘g ≈ (x/x∗)(1−x/x∗), ˘g0 ≈ (x/x∗), and ˘g1 ≈ (1−x/x∗) and the fluctuations of the phase , play an important role in the physics of the square-lattice quantum liquid. Together with the energy scale 2 0, which gives the maximum magnitude of the s1 fermion spinon pairing energy, they fully control the order parameters of both the short-range spin and long-range superconducting correlations. Indeed, for temperatures T < Tc, the short-range spin ordered phase has both a macroscopic quantum phase-coherent pair superconducting order so that |heiθi| > 0, and a short-range spin order, whereas for Tc < T < T∗ only the latter order prevails yet there remain c fermion pairing correlations such that |heiθ1i| > 0 but heiθ0i = 0. Here the critical temperature Tc and the crossover pseudogap temperature T∗ are fully controlled by the absolute value of the order parameters of the two above orders, respectively. However, the square-lattice quantum liquid alone does not describe quantitatively the unusual properties of the hole-doped cuprates. To fulfill such a goal we profit from a suitable theory according to which the interplay of electronic correlations described by the square-lattice quantum liquid of charge c fermions and spin-neutral two-spinon s1 fermions with intrinsic disorder, is behind the unusual properties of the holedoped hight-temperature cuprate superconductors. By profiting from such an interplay, an excellent quantitative agreement with experiments for the physical quantities of several families of hole-doped cuprates is reached. That includes universal properties such as a dome-like critical-temperature hole-concentration dependence and normal-state linear-T resistivity near optimal doping, extending over a wide temperature window. The results confirm a coexisting two-gap scenario associated with an incoherent two-spinon pairing and a coherent twoc- fermion pairing, respectively. While most of our studies focus on the superconducting and magnetic properties of the square-lattice quantum liquid associated with the Hubbard model on the square lattice, the magnetic properties of a related model – the periodic Anderson model – are also addressed, on the cubic lattice.
Many correlated materials display a quantum-critical point between a paramagnetic and a spin-density wave (SDW) state. The SDW wave vector connects points, so-called hot spots, on opposite sides of the Fermi surface. The Fermi velocities at these pairs of points are in general not parallel. Here, we consider the case where pairs of hot spots coalesce, and the wave vector $(\ensuremath{\pi},\ensuremath{\pi})$ of the SDW connects hot spots with parallel Fermi velocities. Using the specific example of electron-doped cuprates, we first show that Kanamori screening and generic features of the Lindhard function make this case experimentally relevant. The temperature dependence of the correlation length, the spin susceptibility, and the self-energy at the hot spots are found using the two-particle self-consistent theory and specific numerical examples worked out for band and interaction parameters characteristic of the electron-doped cuprates. While the curvature of the Fermi surface at the hot spots leads to deviations from perfect nesting, the pseudonesting conditions lead to drastic modifications of the temperature dependence of these physical observables: Neglecting logarithmic corrections, the correlation length $\ensuremath{\xi}$ scales like 1/T, namely, z=1 instead of the naive z=2, the $(\ensuremath{\pi},\ensuremath{\pi})$ static spin susceptibility $\ensuremath{\chi}$ like 1/T, and the imaginary part of the self-energy at the hot spots like T3/2. The correction ${T}_{1}^{\ensuremath{-}1}\ensuremath{\sim}{T}^{3/2}$ to the Korringa NMR relaxation rate is subdominant. We also consider this problem at zero temperature, or for frequencies larger than temperature, using a field-theoretical model of gapless collective bosonic modes (SDW fluctuations) interacting with fermions. The imaginary part of the retarded fermionic self-energy close to the hot spots scales as $\ensuremath{-}{\ensuremath{\omega}}^{3/2}\mathrm{ln}\ensuremath{\omega}$. This is less singular than earlier predictions of the form $\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\omega}\mathrm{ln}\ensuremath{\omega}$. The difference arises from the effects of umklapp terms that were not included in previous studies.
We study a model of strongly-correlated systems that incorporates phases such as Fermi liquids, non-Fermi liquids, and superconductivity, in addition to potential intertwined orders. The model describes Fermi surfaces of spinful electron gas or electron liquid coupled to bosons via an intermediate gauge field. Effectively, the coupling imposes constraints and interactions between the fermion spin and the local boson density. This grants the bosons the meaning as the Schwinger boson of the magnetic order and allows us to probe a larger phase space, rather than around the quantum critical point. We design the initial model so that after the boson and gauge fields are integrated out exactly, the resulting fermion-only effective theory only consists of several local interactions, allowing controlled weak-coupling interpretation for certain parameter regions. Consequently, we find a non-Fermi liquid whose degrees of freedom in the effective theory take the form of an \emph{emergent} Fermi surface that has a different Luttinger volume from the original fermions, therefore explicitly violates the Luttinger theorem. Further, this allows a d-wave superconducting instability if the effective interacting induced by boson coupling is in the relevant pairing channel. When the emergent Fermi surface undergoes a Lifshitz transition, the carrier type changes. In addition, we attribute the Mott insulating behavior in the strong coupling limit to the loss of emergent Fermi surface and argue the possibility of coexisting magnetic order. Our effective theory also suggests the possibility of charge density waves as a consequence of \emph{effective} strong repulsion and is independent of the Fermi-surface-nesting scenario. We discuss the possible optimal conditions for higher superconducting transition temperature and potential relevances and implications for realistic materials.