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Bulletin of the American Physical Society

Hole binding in Mott antiferromagnets: A DMRG study

Zheng Zhu, Hong‐Chen Jiang, D. N. Sheng, Zheng-Yu Weng

Published Dec 24, 2013• 0 citations
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Abstract

Department of Physics and Astronomy, California State University, Northridge, CA, 91330, USA(Dated: December 30, 2013)The binding of two holes injected in antiferromagnets is studied based on the density matrix renormalizationgroup simulation for the t-J square ladders. It is shown that the binding strength is substantially enhanced ina spin background of short-range spin correlations as opposed to that of quasi-long-range spin correlations.However, it is further shown that such strong hole binding gets significantly diminished once phase strings areswitched off. In the latter case, a coherent quasiparticle picture is restored for an unpaired single hole. Bycontrast, the quantum frustration of the single hole’s motion due to phase strings can be effectively removed bypairing, and thus a strong binding force hidden in the kinetic energy term is revealed for the t-J model.

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•Jan 1, 2003•1 citation
Department of Physics and Astronomy, California State University, Northridge, CA, 91330, USA(Dated: December 30, 2013)The binding of two holes injected in antiferromagnets is studied based on the density matrix renormalizationgroup simulation for the t-J square ladders. It is shown that the binding strength is substantially enhanced ina spin background of short-range spin correlations as opposed to that of quasi-long-range spin correlations.However, it is further shown that such strong hole binding gets significantly diminished once phase strings areswitched off. In the latter case, a coherent quasiparticle picture is restored for an unpaired single hole. Bycontrast, the quantum frustration of the single hole’s motion due to phase strings can be effectively removed bypairing, and thus a strong binding force hidden in the kinetic energy term is revealed for the t-J model.
Cooper pairing instability in a Fermi liquid is well understood by the BCS theory, but pairing mechanism for doped Mott insulators still remains elusive. Previously it has been shown by density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) method that a single doped hole is always self-localized due to the quantum destructive interference of the phase string signs hidden in the t-J ladders. Here we report a DMRG investigation of hole binding in the same model, where a novel pairing-glue scheme beyond the BCS realm is discovered. Specifically, we show that, in addition to spin pairing due to superexchange interaction, the strong frustration of the phase string signs on the kinetic energy gets effectively removed by pairing the charges, which results in strong binding of two holes. By contrast, if the phase string signs are "switched off" artificially, the pairing strength diminishes significantly even if the superexchange coupling remains the same. In the latter, unpaired holes behave like coherent quasiparticles with pairing drastically weakened, whose sole origin may be attributed to the resonating-valence-bond (RVB) pairing of spins. Such non-BCS pairing mechanism is therefore beyond the RVB picture and may shed important light on the high-T(c) cuprate superconductors.
A long-standing issue in the physics of strongly correlated electronic systems is whether the motion of a single hole in quantum antiferromagnets can be understood in terms of the quasiparticle picture. Very recently, investigations of this issue have been within the experimental reach. Here we perform a large-scale density matrix renormalization group study, and provide the first unambiguous numerical evidence showing that in ladder systems, a single hole doped in the Mott antiferromagnet does not behave as a quasiparticle. Specifically, the injected hole is found to be always localized as long as the leg number is larger than one, with a vanishing quasiparticle weight and a localization length monotonically decreasing with the leg number. In addition, the single hole self-localization is insensitive to the parity (even-odd) of the leg number. Our findings may advance conceptual developments in different fields of condensed matter physics. First of all, the intriguing self-localization phenomenon is of pure strong correlation origin free of extrinsic disorders. Therefore, it is in sharp contrast to the well-known Anderson localization and recently found many-body localization, where extrinsic disordered potentials play crucial roles. Second, they confirm the analytical predictions of the so-called phase string theory, suggesting that the phase string effect lies in the core of the physics of doped Mott antiferromagnets.
A single-hole ground state Ansatz for the two-dimensional t-J model has been recently studied by the variational Monte Carlo (VMC) method.Such a doped hole behaves like a "twisted" non-Landau quasiparticle characterized by an emergent quantum number in agreement with exact numerics.In this work, we further investigate the ground state of two holes by VMC.It is found that the two holes strongly attract each other to form a pairing state with a new quantum number the same as obtained by the numerical exact diagonalization and density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) calculations.A unique feature of this pairing state is a dichotomy in the pairing symmetry, i.e., a d wave in terms of the electron c operators and an s wave in terms of the new quasiparticles, as explicitly illustrated in the ground state wave function.A similar VMC study of a two-hole wave function for the t-J two-leg ladder also yields a good agreement with the DMRG result.We demonstrate that the pairing mechanism responsible for the strong binding here is not due to the long-range antiferromagnetic order nor the resonating-valence-bound pairing in the spin background but is the consequence of the quantum phase strings created by the hopping of holes.The resulting spin-current pattern mediating the pairing force is explicitly illustrated in the VMC calculation.Physical implications to superconductivity at finite doping are also discussed.
Understanding the doped Mott insulator is a central challenge in condensed matter physics. In this work, we first explicitly identify a new sign structure in the $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}{t}^{\ensuremath{'}}\text{\ensuremath{-}}J$ model on the square lattice that replaces the conventional Fermi statistics for weakly interacting electrons. Then we show that the singular, i.e., the phase-string part of the sign structure in the partition function can be precisely turned off in a modified model. The density matrix renormalization group method is then employed to study these two models comparatively on finite-size systems, which is designed to unveil the consequences of the phase-string component. We find that the hole pairing is present not only in the quasi-long-range superconducting phase but also in the stripe phase of the $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}{t}^{\ensuremath{'}}\text{\ensuremath{-}}J$ model. However, once the phase-string is switched off, both the superconducting and stripe orders together with the underlying hole pairing disappear. The corresponding ground state reduces to a trivial Fermi-liquid-like state with small hole Fermi pockets that is decoupled from the antiferromagnetic spin background. It is in sharp contrast to the original $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}{t}^{\ensuremath{'}}\text{\ensuremath{-}}J$ model where large Fermi surfaces can be restored in the stripe phase found at ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}/t<0$ or the superconducting phase at ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}/t>0$ in the six-leg ladder calculation. Our study clearly demonstrates that the strong correlation effect in doped Mott insulator should be mainly attributed to the long-range quantum entanglement between the spin and charge, which is, nonperturbatively, beyond a simple spin-charge separation under the no double occupancy constraint.
The fate of a hole injected in an antiferromagnet is an outstanding issue of strongly correlated physics. It provides important insights into doped Mott insulators closely related to high-temperature superconductivity. Here, we report a systematic numerical study of t-J ladder systems based on the density matrix renormalization group. It reveals a surprising result for the single hole's motion in an otherwise well-understood undoped system. Specifically, we find that the common belief of quasiparticle picture is invalidated by the self-localization of the doped hole. In contrast to Anderson localization caused by disorders, the charge localization discovered here is an entirely new phenomenon purely of strong correlation origin. It results from destructive quantum interference of novel signs picked up by the hole, and since the same effect is of a generic feature of doped Mott physics, our findings unveil a new paradigm which may go beyond the single hole doped system.
Abstract. We introduce a Hubbard model on a particular class of geometries, and consider the effect of doping the highly spin-degenerate Mott-insulating state with a microscopic number of holes in the extreme strong-coupling limit. The geometry is quite general, with pairs of atomic sites at each superlattice vertex, and a highly frustrated inter-atomic connectivity: the one dimensional realization is a chain of edge-sharing tetrahedra. The sole model parameter is the ratio of intrapair to inter-pair hopping matrix elements. If the intra-pair hopping is negligible then introducing a microscopic number of holes results in a ferromagnetic Nagaoka groundstate. Conversely, if the intra-pair hopping is comparable with the inter-pair hopping then the groundstate is low spin with short-ranged spin correlations. We exactly solve the correlated motion of a pair of holes in such a state and find that, in 1-d and 2-d, they form a bound pair on a length scale that increases with diminishing binding energy. This result is pertinent to the long-standing problem of hole-motion in the CuO2 planes of the high-temperature superconductors: we have rigorously shown that, on our frustrated geometry, the holes pair up and a short-ranged low-spin state is generated by hole motion alone. Submitted to: J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 1.