Superconductivity of the spin ladder system: pairing and spin gap

T. Kimura, Kazuhiko Kuroki, Hideo Aoki

In order to shed light whether the `even-odd conjecture' (even numbers of legs will superconduct accompanied by a spin gap while odd ones do not) for correlated electrons in ladder systems, the pairing correlation is studied for the Hubbard model on a two- and three-leg ladders. We have employed both the weak-coupling renormalization group and the quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) method for strong interactions. For the two-leg Hubbard ladder, a systematic QMC (with a controlled level spacings) has detected an enhanced pairing correlation, which is consistent with the weak-coupling prediction. We also calculate the correlation functions in the three-leg Hubbard ladder and show that the weak-coupling study predicts the dominant superconductivity, which refutes the naive even-odd conjecture. A crucial point is a spin gap for only some of the multiple spin modes is enough to make the ladder superconduct with a pairing symmetry (d-like here) compatible with the gapped mode. A QMC study for the three-leg ladder endorses the enhanced pairing correlation.

Philippe A. Martin, FRANÇOIS ROTHEN

Philippe A. Martin, FRANÇOIS ROTHEN

J. P. Rodriguez

The low-energy charge excitations of a doped antiferromagnetic ladder are modeled by a system of interacting spinless fermions that live on the same ladder. A relatively large spin gap is assumed to ``freeze out'' all spin fluctuations. We find that the formation of rung hole pairs coincides with the opening of a single-particle gap for charge excitations along chains and with the absence of coherent tunneling in between chains. We also find that such hole pairs condense into either a crystalline or superconducting state as a function of the binding energy.

Leon N. Cooper

Luca Fausto Tocchio, Federico Becca, Arianna Montorsi

Short-range antiferromagnetic correlations are known to open a spin gap in the repulsive Hubbard model on ladders with \boldsymbol{M} 𝐌 legs, when \boldsymbol{M} 𝐌 is even. We show that the spin gap originates from the formation of correlated pairs of electrons with opposite spin, captured by the hidden ordering of a spin-parity operator. Since both spin gap and parity vanish in the two-dimensional limit, we introduce the fractional generalization of spin parity and prove that it remains finite in the thermodynamic limit. Our results are based upon variational wave functions and Monte Carlo calculations: performing a finite size-scaling analysis with growing \boldsymbol{M} 𝐌 , we show that the doping region where the parity is finite coincides with the range in which superconductivity is observed in two spatial dimensions. Our observations support the idea that superconductivity emerges out of spin gapped phases on ladders, driven by a spin-pairing mechanism, in which the ordering is conveniently captured by the finiteness of the fractional spin-parity operator.