Superconductivity from a confinement transition out of a fractionalized Fermi liquid with Z 2 topological and Ising-nematic orders
Shubhayu Chatterjee, Yang Qi, Subir Sachdev A +1 more
A ${\mathbb{Z}}_{2}$ fractionalized Fermi liquid (FL*) is a novel state of strongly correlated quantum matter. Although it is metallic, it violates Luttinger's theorem on the volume enclosed by the Fermi surface obeyed by conventional metals; this is possible due to the presence of emergent gauge excitations. The authors study here the superconducting states that can arise out of instabilities of such a topological metal. In particular, they focus on a FL* topological metal that has favorable energetics on the square lattice with nematic order, relevant to the cuprate superconductors. They find that a Higgs transition out of this FL* results in confinement of the anyonic degrees of freedom, and the resulting state is a superconductor with broken translation symmetry or time-reversal invariance. In the process, they also establish a complete mapping between bosonic and fermionic descriptions of time-reversal invariant gapped insulating ${\mathbb{Z}}_{2}$ spin liquid states on the rectangular lattice, which, on doping with charge carriers, can give rise to FL* phases. They also note a possible connection to the recent observation of pair density waves in the superconducting state of the underdoped cuprates.
arXiv:1603.03041•Physical review. B./Physical review. B•Jul 5, 2016•18 citations