Superconductivity from interband coupling to ferroelectric quantum critical fluctuations in two dimensions

Abstract

Soft critical fluctuations associated with ferroelectric quantum phase transitions are typically transverse owing to their polar nature. This implies that the conventional density--density electron--phonon coupling to these modes is strongly suppressed, which is puzzling as a variety of materials exhibit enhanced superconductivity in the vicinity of ferroelectricity. An alternative coupling mechanism is an interband ``Stark''-like coupling that connects bands of opposite parity. In the limit where one of the bands is far in energy, these processes generate an effective quadratic (two-phonon) coupling. In contrast, when both bands lie close to the Fermi energy, the resulting interaction develops singular behavior due to the additional gapless electronic states, motivating a detailed study into the dynamics of this effective two-phonon coupling. To this end, we construct the quantum critical Eliashberg theory for a two-dimensional system across a wide range of interband gap magnitudes, near the quantum critical point. We find that the critical temperature $T_c$ is strongly enhanced relative to conventional BCS expectations. In the large-gap limit, the pairing kernel acquires higher-order logarithmic contributions, leading to a parametrically enhanced $T_c$ governed by cubic and quadratic logarithmic terms. In the small-gap regime, the pairing scale exhibits a modified BCS-like form with an enhanced dependence on the inverse square root of the dimensionless coupling constant. The enhancement is due to the dynamics of the two-phonon pairing whose infrared cutoff is set by $T_c$, resulting in a significant enhancement of superconductivity compared to three-dimensional systems, where it is set by the Fermi energy. Our results elucidate the unique dynamical properties of effective two-phonon interactions, and may be relevant to layered compounds like Td-MoTe$_2$ and doped SrTiO$_3$ membranes.