arXiv subjects

Edwin W. Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Edwin W. Huang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Generic character of charge and spin density waves in superconducting cuprates

Understanding the nature of charge density waves (CDW) in cuprate superconductors has been complicated by material specific differences. A striking example is the opposite doping dependence of the CDW ordering wavevector in La-based and Y-based compounds, the two families where charge ordering is strongest and best characterized. Here we report a combined resonant soft X-ray scattering (RSXS) and neutron scattering study of charge and spin density waves in isotopically enriched La$_{1.8-x}$ Eu$_{0.2}$ Sr$_{x}$ CuO$_{4}$ over a range of doping $0.07 \leq x \leq 0.20$. For all dopings studied by RSXS, we find that the CDW amplitude is approximately temperature-independent and develops well above experimentally accessible temperatures. Surprisingly, the CDW ordering wavevector shows a non-monotonic temperature dependence, with a sudden change occurring at temperatures near the SDW onset temperature. We describe this behavior with a Landau-Ginzburg theory for an incommensurate CDW in a metallic system with a finite charge compressibility and CDW-SDW coupling. Our Landau-Ginzburg analysis suggests that the ordering wavevector at high temperatures decreases with increased doping. This behavior is opposite to the trend at low temperatures and highly reminiscent of the doping dependence seen in YBa$_2$ Cu$_3$ O$_{6+δ}$ , suggesting a common origin of the CDW in hole-doped cuprate superconductors.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2021

Determinantal Quantum Monte Carlo solver for Cluster Perturbation Theory

Cluster Perturbation Theory (CPT) is a technique for computing the spectral function of fermionic models with local interactions. By combining the solution of the model on a finite cluster with perturbation theory on intra-cluster hoppings, CPT provides access to single-particle properties with arbitrary momentum resolution while incurring low computational cost. Here, we introduce Determinantal Quantum Monte Carlo (DQMC) as a solver for CPT. Compared to the standard solver, exact diagonalization (ED), the DQMC solver reduces finite size effects through utilizing larger clusters, allows study of temperature dependence, and enables large-scale simulations of a greater set of models. We discuss the implementation of the DQMC solver for CPT and benchmark the CPT+DQMC method for the attractive and repulsive Hubbard models, showcasing its advantages over standard DQMC and CPT+ED simulations.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2021

Numerical approaches for calculating the low-field dc Hall coefficient of the doped Hubbard model

Using determinant Quantum Monte Carlo, we compare three methods of evaluating the dc Hall coefficient $R_H$ of the Hubbard model: the direct measurement of the off-diagonal current-current correlator $χ_{xy}$ in a system coupled to a finite magnetic field (FF), $χ_{xy}^{\text{FF}}$; the three-current linear response to an infinitesimal field as measured in the zero-field (ZF) Hubbard Hamiltonian, $χ_{xy}^{\text{ZF}}$; and the leading order of the recurrent expansion $R_H^{(0)}$ in terms of thermodynamic susceptibilities. The two quantities $χ_{xy}^{\text{FF}}$ and $χ_{xy}^{\text{ZF}}$ can be compared directly in imaginary time. Proxies for $R_H$ constructed from the three-current correlator $χ_{xy}^{\text{ZF}}$ can be determined under different simplifying assumptions and compared with $R_H^{(0)}$. We find these different quantities to be consistent with one another, validating previous conclusions about the close correspondence between Fermi surface topology and the sign of $R_H$, even for strongly correlated systems. These various quantities also provide a useful set of numerical tools for testing theoretical predictions about the full behavior of the Hall conductivity for strong correlations.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2021

Tendencies of enhanced electronic nematicity in the Hubbard model and a comparison with Raman scattering on high-temperature superconductors

The pseudogap regime of the cuprate high-temperature superconductors is characterized by a variety of competing orders, the nature of which are still widely debated. Recent experiments have provided evidence for electron nematic order, in which the electron fluid breaks rotational symmetry while preserving translational invariance. Raman spectroscopy, with its ability to symmetry resolve low energy excitations, is a unique tool that can be used to assess nematic fluctuations and nematic ordering tendencies. Here, we compare results from determinant quantum Monte Carlo simulations of the Hubbard model to experimental results from Raman spectroscopy in $\text{La}_{2-x}\text{Sr}_{x}\text{CuO}_{4}$, which show a prominent increase in the $B_{1g}$ response around 10% hole doping as the temperature decreases, indicative of a rise in nematic fluctuations at low energy. Our results support a picture of nematic fluctuations with $B_{1g}$ symmetry occurring in underdoped cuprates, which may arise from melted stripes at elevated temperatures.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2020

Emergence of Quasiparticles in a Doped Mott Insulator

How a Mott insulator develops into a weakly coupled metal upon doping is a central question to understanding various emergent correlated phenomena. To analyze this evolution and its connection to the high-$T_c$ cuprates, we study the single-particle spectrum for the doped Hubbard model using cluster perturbation theory on superclusters. Starting from extremely low doping, we identify a heavily renormalized quasiparticle dispersion that immediately develops across the Fermi level, and a weakening polaronic side band at higher binding energy. The quasiparticle spectral weight roughly grows at twice the rate of doping in the low doping regime, but this rate is halved at optimal doping. In the heavily doped regime, we find both strong electron-hole asymmetry and a persistent presence of Mott spectral features. Finally, we discuss the applicability of the single-band Hubbard model to describe the evolution of nodal spectra measured by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) on the single-layer cuprate La$_{2-x}$Sr$_x$CuO$_4$ ($0 \le x \le 0.15$). This work benchmarks the predictive power of the Hubbard model for electronic properties of high-$T_c$ cuprates.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2020

Strong-coupling mechanism of the pseudogap in small Hubbard clusters

In the hole-doped cuprates, the pseudogap refers to a suppression of the density of states at low energies, in the absence of superconducting long-range order. Numerous calculations of the Hubbard model show a pseudogap in the single-particle spectra, with striking similarities to photoemission and tunneling experiments on cuprates. However, no clear mechanism has been established. Here, we solve the Hubbard model on $2\times2$ clusters by exact diagonalization, with integration over twisted boundary conditions. A pseudogap is found in the single-particle density of states with the following characteristics: a decreasing energy scale and onset temperature for increased hole-doping, closure at a critical hole doping near 15\%, absence upon electron-doping, particle-hole asymmetry indicated by the location of the gap center, and persistence in the strong-coupling limit of $U/t \to \infty$. Studying the many-body excitation spectrum reveals that the pseudogap in single-particle spectra is due to orthogonality between bare electrons and the lowest energy excitations for $U/t \gtrsim 8$.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2020

Extracting correlation effects from Momentum-Resolved Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy (M-EELS): Synergistic origin of the dispersion kink in Bi$_{2.1}$Sr$_{1.9}$CaCu$_2$O$_{8+x}$

We employ Momentum-Resolved Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy (M-EELS) on Bi2.1Sr1.9CaCu2O8+x to resolve the issue of the kink feature in the electron dispersion widely observed in the cuprates. To this end, we utilize the GW approximation to relate the density response function measured in in M-EELS to the self-energy, isolating contributions from phonons, electrons, and the momentum dependence of the effective interaction to the decay rates. The phononic contributions, present in the M-EELS spectra due to electron-phonon coupling, lead to kink features in the corresponding single-particle spectra at energies between 40 meV and 80 meV, independent of the doping level. We find that a repulsive interaction constant in momentum space is able to yield the kink attributed to phonons in ARPES. Hence, our analysis of the M-EELS spectra points to local repulsive interactions as a factor that enhances the spectroscopic signatures of electron-phonon coupling in cuprates. We conclude that the strength of the kink feature in cuprates is determined by the combined action of electron-phonon coupling and electron-electron interactions.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2020

DC Hall coefficient of the strongly correlated Hubbard model

The Hall coefficient is related to the effective carrier density and Fermi surface topology in noninteracting and weakly interacting systems. In strongly correlated systems, the relation between the Hall coefficient and single-particle properties is less clear. Clarifying this relation would give insight into the nature of transport in strongly correlated materials that lack well-formed quasiparticles. In this work, we investigate the DC Hall coefficient of the Hubbard model using determinant quantum Monte Carlo in conjunction with a recently developed expansion of magneto-transport coefficients in terms of thermodynamic susceptibilities. At leading order in the expansion, we observe a change of sign in the Hall coefficient as a function of temperature and interaction strength, which we relate to a change in the topology of the apparent Fermi surface. We also combine our Hall coefficient results with optical conductivity values to evaluate the Hall angle, as well as effective mobility and effective mass based on Drude theory of metals.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2020

Exact Superconducting Instability in a Doped Mott Insulator

Because the cuprate superconductors are doped Mott insulators, it would be advantageous to solve even a toy model that exhibits both Mottness and superconductivity. We consider the Hatsugai-Kohmoto model, an exactly solvable system that is a prototypical Mott insulator above a critical interaction strength at half filling. Upon doping or reducing the interaction strength, our exact calculations show that the system becomes a non-Fermi liquid metal with a superconducting instability. In the presence of a weak pairing interaction, the instability produces a thermal transition to a superconducting phase, which is distinct from the BCS state, as evidenced by a gap-to-transition temperature ratio exceeding the universal BCS limit. The elementary excitations of this superconductor are not Bogoliubov quasiparticles but rather superpositions of doublons and holons, composite excitations signaling that the superconducting ground state of the doped Mott insulator inherits the non-Fermi liquid character of the normal state. An unexpected feature of this model is that it exhibits a superconductivity-induced transfer of spectral weight from high to low energies as seen in the cuprates as well as a suppression of the superfluid density relative to that in BCS theory.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2019

Pairing and non-Fermi liquid behavior in partially flat-band systems

While multiband systems are usually considered for flat-band physics, here we study one-band models that have flat portions in the dispersion to explore correlation effects in the 2D repulsive Hubbard model in an intermediate coupling regime. The FLEX+DMFT~(the dynamical mean-field theory combined with the fluctuation exchange approximation) is used to show that we have a crossover from ferromagnetic to antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations as the band filling is varied, which triggers a crossover from triplet to singlet pairings with a peculiar filling dependence that is dominated by the size of the flat region in the dispersion. A curious manifestation of the flat part appears as larger numbers of nodal lines associated with pairs extended in real space. We further detect non-Fermi liquid behavior in the momentum distribution function, frequency dependence of the self-energy and spectral function. These indicate correlation physics peculiar to flat-band systems.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2019

Biexciton Condensation in Electron-hole Doped Hubbard Bilayers -- A Sign-Problem-Free Quantum Monte Carlo Study

The bilayer Hubbard model with electron-hole doping is an ideal platform to study excitonic orders due to suppressed recombination via spatial separation of electrons and holes. However, suffering from the sign problem, previous quantum Monte Carlo studies could not arrive at an unequivocal conclusion regarding the presence of phases with clear signatures of excitonic condensation in bilayer Hubbard models. Here, we develop a determinant quantum Monte Carlo (DQMC) algorithm for the bilayer Hubbard model that is sign-problem-free for equal and opposite doping in the two layers, and study excitonic order and charge and spin density modulations as a function of chemical potential difference between the two layers, on-site Coulomb repulsion, and inter-layer interaction. In the intermediate coupling regime and in proximity to the SU(4)-symmetric point, we find a biexcitonic condensate phase at finite electron-hole doping, as well as a competing $(π,π)$ charge density wave (CDW) state. We extract the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition temperature from superfluid density and a finite size scaling analysis of the correlation functions, and explain our results in terms of an effective biexcitonic hardcore boson model.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2019

Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy of a Fermi-Hubbard system

Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) measures the single-particle excitations of a many-body quantum system with both energy and momentum resolution, providing detailed information about strongly interacting materials. ARPES is a direct probe of fermion pairing, and hence a natural technique to study the development of superconductivity in a variety of experimental systems ranging from high temperature superconductors to unitary Fermi gases. In these systems a remnant gap-like feature persists in the normal state, which is referred to as a pseudogap. A quantitative understanding of pseudogap regimes may elucidate details about the pairing mechanisms that lead to superconductivity, but developing this is difficult in real materials partly because the microscopic Hamiltonian is not known. Here we report on the development of ARPES to study strongly interacting fermions in an optical lattice using a quantum gas microscope. We benchmark the technique by measuring the occupied single-particle spectral function of an attractive Fermi-Hubbard system across the BCS-BEC crossover and comparing to quantum Monte Carlo calculations. We find evidence for a pseudogap in our system that opens well above the expected critical temperature for superfluidity. This technique may also be applied to the doped repulsive Hubbard model which is expected to exhibit a pseudogap at temperatures close to those achieved in recent experiments.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2019

Strange metallicity in the doped Hubbard model

Strange or bad metallic transport, defined by its incompatibility with conventional quasiparticle pictures, is a theme common to strongly correlated materials and ubiquitous in many high temperature superconductors. The Hubbard model represents a minimal starting point for modeling strongly correlated systems. Here we demonstrate strange metallic transport in the doped two-dimensional Hubbard model using determinantal quantum Monte Carlo calculations. Over a wide range of doping, we observe resistivities exceeding the Mott-Ioffe-Regel limit with linear temperature dependence. The temperatures of our calculations extend to as low as 1/40 the non-interacting bandwidth, placing our findings in the degenerate regime relevant to experimental observations of strange metallicity. Our results provide a foundation for connecting theories of strange metals to models of strongly correlated materials.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2018

Enhanced correlations and superconductivity in weakly interacting partially flat band systems: a determinantal quantum Monte Carlo study

Motivated by recent experiments realizing correlated phenomena and superconductivity in 2D van der Waals devices, we consider the general problem of whether correlation effects may be enhanced by modifying band structure while keeping a fixed weak interaction strength. Using determinantal quantum Monte Carlo, we study the 2D Hubbard model for two different band structures: a regular nearest-neighbor tight-binding model, and a partially flat band structure containing a non-dispersing region, with identical total non-interacting bandwidth $W$. For both repulsive and attractive weak interactions ($|U| \ll W$), correlated phenomena are significantly stronger in the partially flat model. In the repulsive case, even with $U$ an order of magnitude smaller than $W$, we find the presence of a Mott insulating state near half-filling of the flat region in momentum space. In the attractive case, where generically the ground state is superconducting, the partially flat model exhibits significantly enhanced superconducting transition temperatures. These results suggest the possibility of engineering correlation effects in materials by tuning the non-interacting electronic dispersion.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2018

Magnon Splitting Induced by Charge Transfer in the Three-Orbital Hubbard Model

Understanding spin excitations and their connection to unconventional superconductivity have remained a central issue since the discovery of the cuprates. Direct measurement of the dynamical spin structure factor in the parent compounds can provide key information on important interactions relevant in the doped regime, and variations in the magnon dispersion have been linked closely to differences in crystal structure between families of cuprate compounds. Here, we elucidate the relationship between spin excitations and various controlling factors thought to be significant in high-$T_c$ materials by systematically evaluating the dynamical spin structure factor for the three-orbital Hubbard model, revealing differences in the spin dispersion along the Brillouin zone axis and the diagonal. Generally, we find that the absolute energy scale and momentum dependence of the excitations primarily are sensitive to the effective charge-transfer energy, while changes in the on-site Coulomb interactions have little effect on the details of the dispersion. In particular, our result highlights the splitting between spin excitations along the axial and diagonal directions in the Brillouin zone. This splitting decreases with increasing charge-transfer energy and correlates with changes in the apical oxygen position, and general structural variations, for different cuprate families.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2018

Stripe order from the perspective of the Hubbard model

A microscopic understanding of the strongly correlated physics of the cuprates must account for the translational and rotational symmetry breaking that is present across all cuprate families, commonly in the form of stripes. Here we investigate emergence of stripes in the Hubbard model, a minimal model believed to be relevant to the cuprate superconductors, using determinant quantum Monte Carlo (DQMC) simulations at finite temperatures and density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) ground state calculations. By varying temperature, doping, and model parameters, we characterize the extent of stripes throughout the phase diagram of the Hubbard model. Our results show that including the often neglected next-nearest-neighbor hopping leads to the absence of spin incommensurability upon electron-doping and nearly half-filled stripes upon hole-doping. The similarities of these findings to experimental results on both electron and hole-doped cuprate families support a unified description across a large portion of the cuprate phase diagram.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2018

Breakdown of Migdal-Eliashberg theory; a determinant quantum Monte Carlo study

The superconducting (SC) and charge-density-wave (CDW) susceptibilities of the two dimensional Holstein model are computed using determinant quantum Monte Carlo (DQMC), and compared with results computed using the Migdal-Eliashberg (ME) approach. We access temperatures as low as 25 times less than the Fermi energy, $E_F$, which are still above the SC transition. We find that the SC susceptibility at low $T$ agrees quantitatively with the ME theory up to a dimensionless electron-phonon coupling $λ_0 \approx 0.4$ but deviates dramatically for larger $λ_0$. We find that for large $λ_0$ and small phonon frequency $ω_0 \ll E_F$ CDW ordering is favored and the preferred CDW ordering vector is uncorrelated with any obvious feature of the Fermi surface.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2017

Doping dependence of ordered phases and emergent quasiparticles in the doped Hubbard-Holstein model

We present determinant quantum Monte Carlo simulations of the hole-doped single-band Hubbard-Holstein model on a square lattice, to investigate how quasiparticles emerge when doping a Mott insulator (MI) or a Peierls insulator (PI). The MI regime at large Hubbard interaction $U$ and small relative electron-phonon coupling strength $λ$ is quickly suppressed upon doping, by drawing spectral weight from the upper Hubbard band and shifting the lower Hubbard band towards the Fermi level, leading to a metallic state with emergent quasiparticles at the Fermi level. On the other hand, the PI regime at large $λ$ and small $U$ persists out to relatively high doping levels. We study the evolution of the $d$-wave superconducting susceptibility with doping, and find that it increases with lowering temperature in a regime of intermediate values of $U$ and $λ$.

cond-mat.str-el↗