The superconducting properties of the one-dimensional model of “relativistic” fermions with attraction generated by antiferromagnetic (Heisenberg) pair superexchange spin interaction are studied. Namely, we demonstrate that such a pairing in this system takes place in the nematic channel, with extended s-wave symmetry, where the attraction between fermions mostly takes place when the fermions occupy the nearest sites. It is demonstrated, that the zero-temperature properties of such a system are rather different from the “standard” case of superconductivity with local attraction. For instance, the order parameter has an unusual helical momentum dependence, ∼e−ika, where a is the lattice parameter and the dependence of the gap on doping has a bell shape, qualitatively similar to cuprate high-Tc superconductors. Finally, the smooth transition from the overlapping pair to the local pair regime (or BCS–BEC crossover) in the nematic phase takes place at much lower values of doping as compared to the local pairing case, i.e., the “relativistic 1D” nematic superconductor is much less “friendly” to the local pairs. We also discuss the possible relation of the properties of this model to the superconducting properties of twisted graphene.
The superconducting properties of the one-dimensional model of “relativistic” fermions with attraction generated by antiferromagnetic (Heisenberg) pair superexchange spin interaction are studied. Namely, we demonstrate that such a pairing in this system takes place in the nematic channel, with extended s-wave symmetry, where the attraction between fermions mostly takes place when the fermions occupy the nearest sites. It is demonstrated, that the zero-temperature properties of such a system are rather different from the “standard” case of superconductivity with local attraction. For instance, the order parameter has an unusual helical momentum dependence, ∼e−ika, where a is the lattice parameter and the dependence of the gap on doping has a bell shape, qualitatively similar to cuprate high-Tc superconductors. Finally, the smooth transition from the overlapping pair to the local pair regime (or BCS–BEC crossover) in the nematic phase takes place at much lower values of doping as compared to the local pairing case, i.e., the “relativistic 1D” nematic superconductor is much less “friendly” to the local pairs. We also discuss the possible relation of the properties of this model to the superconducting properties of twisted graphene.
We have analyzed the doping and temperature dependencies of the physical properties of a square-lattice narrow-band superconductor with a relevant for systems with local Hubbard repulsion nematic pairing due to effective nearest-neighbor attraction. Our focus was a possible crossover of the system from the Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) superconductivity to the Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC) regimes with increasing temperature. We have found that in the d-channel the crossover does not take place at realistic values of doping and temperature, and even at a large attraction, i.e., the system is always in the BCS regime, unlike the “usual” d-wave superconductor. Contrary to non-nematic d-wave superconductors, the chemical potential μ always grows with temperature increase that might indicate an unexpectedly large size of Cooper pairs. At the same time, in the s-channel, we have found a BCS–BEC crossover with temperature for a wide range of temperatures even at rather high dopings, nf ≈ 0.2. This result is different from the “usual” s-case, where a narrow-band (i.e., at strong coupling) system is always in the BEC state. We have found for a given large value of attraction that there is a value of doping when for a wide range of temperature the system is in a “pre-crossover” regime with μ ≈ 0, i.e., in a regime of coexistence of local and extended pairs. Thus, in narrow-band systems a “usual” s-superconductor is in a BEC state, but in the nematic case one can expect a BCS–to–BEC crossover with temperature growth at realistic system parameters, i.e., the crossover might be measured experimentally.
High temperature superconductivity in copper oxides (cuprates) represents one of the most striking phenomena in condensed matter physics. These materials host superconducting states with the highest known critical temperatures, emerging upon doping antiferromagnetic insulator compounds. The antiferromagnetic (AF) insulating and superconducting (SC) phases defy standard descriptions in terms of band picture and conventional phonon-mediated superconductivity. In fact, these phenomena are genuine signatures of strong electronic correlations which hinder effective single-particle descriptions of the many-electron system. After 40 years since their discovery, it is widely accepted that the Hubbard model on the square lattice provides a minimal description of the low-energy electronic properties of cuprates. The model describes the competition between the electronic kinetic energy, modelled by nearest-neighbours hopping t, and the Coulomb repulsion, modelled by a purely local interaction potential U. At half-filling, this competition results in the so-called "Mott localisation" phenomenon, which distinguishes the metallic phase for U/t « 1 from an insulating phase for U/t » 1. The latter is characterised by the almost complete localisation of electrons due to the high energetic cost of hopping towards occupied sites. Interestingly, this basic competition is intimately related to AF ordering and, upon doping, to the formation of the SC state with characteristic d-wave symmetry. The fact that a purely repulsive interaction U is responsible for the formation of a SC state is remarkable, being superconductivity typically associated with an effective attractive interaction. In fact, a d-wave SC state can also be obtained, in general, by considering an attractive potential between electrons of neighbouring sites. Motivated by this observation, in this thesis, we study a modified version of the Hubbard model, dubbed as the "extended Hubbard model", in which we include a nearest-neighbours attractive potential -V. The general goal of this work is to explore the interplay between the purely local repulsion and the non-local attraction. This is not only motivated by the fact that both interactions are, in principle, responsible for d-wave superconductivity, but also by recent experimental observations which strongly suggest that the term -V needs to be included in order to accurately describe the magnetic spectra of some specific compounds. In this thesis, we study the extended Hubbard model using the Hartree-Fock method. Namely, we approximate the ground state by implementing a variational search in the subspace of the many-body Hilbert space of gaussian states. Despite its simplicity, the Hartree-Fock method provides a powerful framework to study competition among different phases, originating from different symmetry breaking mechanisms. In particular, we study the competition between three different phases: the normal phase, characterised by no symmetry breaking, the AF phase, characterised by a lowering of SU(2) symmetry, and the SC phase, characterised by the breaking of U(1) charge conservation. This thesis work led to a number of original results, which can be summarised by the general observation that the non-local attraction -V acts cooperatively with the local repulsion U for the stabilisation of the various phases hosted by the Hubbard model. For the normal phase, we find that the non-local attraction acts as a source of Mott localisation, leading to an effective reduction of the electronic bandwidth. In particular, for values of V larger than a critical value and close to half-filling, we find a strong Mott localisation characterised by the complete flattening of the electronic bands. Interestingly, this result shows an example of Mott localisation that can be described at the level of the Hartree-Fock approximation, whereas Mott localisation in the conventional Hubbard model usually requires more sophisticated approximation schemes. For the AF phase, we restrict our analysis to the half-filled case. We find that the pairing-induced Mott localisation leads to a significant enhancement of the magnetisation, primarily originating from the local repulsion U. Finally, we focus on the superconducting phase and derive self-consistency equations in both singlet and triplet Cooper pairing channels, showing how Cooper pairing can be mediated simultaneously by both the local repulsion and the non-local attraction. Therefore, we numerically investigate the singlet channel and find evidence of "symmetry mixing", namely, the formation of a superconducting gap that is neither symmetric nor anti-symmetric under rotations of π/2 in the plane. We show that symmetry mixing is connected to the emergence of a finite nematic order parameter, that signals the breaking of planar rotational symmetry. This nematic symmetry breaking results in the fact that the renormalisation of bands becomes anisotropic, producing a difference in electronic kinetics in the x and y directions. To summarise, the original results obtained in this thesis show that the non-local pairing provides a different route towards the formation of key strongly correlated phenomena, including Mott localisation and nematic superconductivity, and call for future investigation using more sophisticated methods such as, for example, the Dynamical Mean Field Theory.
The superconducting properties of the 2D fermion system with local and different types of the indirect boson-exchange attractions in the cases of s-wave and d-wave pairing are reviewed and analysed at T=0. In particular, the possibility of the crossover from the Bose-Einstein condensation regime to the BCS-like superconductivity with the carrier density and coupling changing in the case of different pairing channels is discussed. Gaussian fluctuations of the order parameter are taken into account and the carrier density dependence of the gap is studied in this case. The role of the interaction form in the physical behavior of the systems is also discussed.
The following thesis is divided in two main parts. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are devoted to the study of the so called pair-density-wave (PDW) superconducting state and some of its connections to electronic liquid crystal (ELC) phases, its topological aspects in a one dimensional model and its appearance in a quasi-one dimensional system. On the other hand, chapter 5 is focused on the investigation of the classical statistical mechanics properties of dimers, in particular, the dimer model on the Aztec diamond graph and its relation with the octahedron equation. In chapter 2 we present a theory of superconducting states where the Cooper pairs have a nonzero center-of-mass momentum, inhomogeneous superconducting states known as a pair-density-waves (PDWs) states. We show that in a system of spin-1/2 fermions in two dimensions in an electronic nematic spin-triplet phase where rotational symmetry is broken in both real and spin space PDW phases arise naturally in a theory that can be analysed using controlled approximations. We show that several superfluid phases that may arise in this phase can be treated within a controlled BCS mean field theory, with the strength of the spin-triplet nematic order parameter playing the role of the small parameter of this theory. We find that in a spin-triplet nematic phase, in addition to a triplet p-wave and spin-singlet d-wave (or s depending on the nematic phase) uniform superconducting states, it is also possible to have a d-wave (or s) PDW superconductor. The PDW phases found here can be either unidirectional, bidirectional, or tridirectional depending on the spin-triplet nematic phase and which superconducting channel is dominant. In addition, a triple-helix state is found in a particular channel. We show that these PDW phases are present in the weak-coupling limit, in contrast to the usual Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov phases, which require strong coupling physics in addition to a large magnetic field (and often both). In chapter 3 we show that the pair-density-wave (PDW) superconducting state emergent in extended Heisenberg-Hubbard models in two-leg ladders is topological in the presence of an Ising spin symmetry and supports a Majorana zero mode (MZM) at an open boundary and at a junction with a uniform d-wave one-dimensional superconductor. Similarly to a conventional finite-momentum paired state, the order parameter of the PDW state is a charge-2e field with finite momentum. However, the order parameter here is a quartic electron operator and conventional mean-field theory cannot be applied to study this state. We use bosonization to show that the 1D PDW state has a MZM at a boundary. This superconducting state is an exotic topological phase supporting Majorana fermions with finite-momentum pairing fields and charge-4e superconductivity. In chapter 4 we provide a quasi-one-dimensional model which can support a PDW state. 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.Within the interchain mean-field theory (MFT), 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 MFT. 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. In chapter 5 we study the octahedron relation (also known as the A∞ T-system), obeyed in particular by the partition function for dimer coverings of the Aztec Diamond graph. For a suitable class of doubly periodic initial conditions, we find exact solutions with a particularly simple factorized form. For these, we show that the density function that measures the average dimer occupation of a face of the Aztec graph, obeys a system of linear recursion relations with periodic coefficients. This allows us to explore the thermodynamic limit of the corresponding dimer models and to derive exact “arctic” curves separating the various phases of the system.
We study the superfluid properties of short-coherence-length superconductors described by the extended Hubbard model with on-site repulsive and intersite attractive interaction. We have analysed the superfluid stiffness and thermodynamic properties of the model versus electron concentration and pairing interaction on a two-dimensional square lattice with nearest- and next-nearest-neighbour hopping. The effects of phase fluctuations on anisotropic superconductivity of extended s-and d x 2 − y 2 -wave type were examined within the Kosterlitz–Thouless (KT) scenario. The KT critical temperatures were determined and compared with those from the BCS–Hartree–Fock approximation. The Uemura-type plots, i.e. the critical temperature versus zero-temperature phase stiffness, were obtained for both extended s- and d-wave pairings. The states with mixed (s ∗ and d x 2 − y 2 ) symmetry, and in particular the time-reversal breaking state of s + id symmetry, were analysed and the phase diagrams taking into account these states are presented. We also briefly discuss the crossover from BCS to local pair superconductivity for the d x 2 − y 2 -wave pairing. A comparison of the theoretical results with the experimental data, in particular those of T c versus λ −2 (0), for high- T c cuprate superconductors is made.
The superconducting properties of a two-dimensional metallic system with arbitrary carrier density and both local and various types of attractive indirect boson-exchange interaction in the cases of s- and d-wave pairing are analyzed and reviewed at T=0. In particular, the possibility of a crossover from the Bose–Einstein condensation regime to Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer-like superconductivity with growing carrier density and changing coupling in the case of different pairing channels is discussed. Gaussian fluctuations of the order parameter are taken into account, and the carrier density dependence of the gap magnitude is studied. The role of the form of the interparticle attractive interaction in the physical behavior of the system is also considered.