High Temperature Superconductivity in La$_3$Ni$_2$O$_7$

Abstract

Motivated by the recent discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in bilayer La$_3$Ni$_2$O$_7$ under pressure, we study its electronic properties and superconductivity due to strong electron correlation. Using the inversion symmetry, we decouple the low-energy electronic structure into block-diagonal symmetric and antisymmetric sectors. We find that the antisymmetric sector can be reduced to a one-band system near half filling, while the symmetric bands occupied by about two electrons are heavily overdoped individually. Using the strong coupling mean field theory, we obtain strong superconducting pairing with $B_{1g}$ symmetry in the antisymmetric sector. We propose that due to the spin-orbital exchange coupling between the two sectors, $B_{1g}$ pairing is induced in the symmetric bands, which in-turn boosts the pairing gap in the antisymmetric band and enhances the high-temperature superconductivity with a congruent $d$-wave symmetry in pressurized La$_3$Ni$_2$O$_7$.