arXiv subjects

J. Zaanen

Publications and source records attributed to J. Zaanen.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2011

Topological Defects Coupling Smectic Modulations to Intra-unit-cell Nematicity in Cuprate

We study the coexisting smectic modulations and intra-unit-cell nematicity in the pseudogap states of underdoped Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ. By visualizing their spatial components separately, we identified 2πtopological defects throughout the phase-fluctuating smectic states. Imaging the locations of large numbers of these topological defects simultaneously with the fluctuations in the intra-unit-cell nematicity revealed strong empirical evidence for a coupling between them. From these observations, we propose a Ginzburg-Landau functional describing this coupling and demonstrate how it can explain the coexistence of the smectic and intra-unit-cell broken symmetries and also correctly predict their interplay at the atomic scale. This theoretical perspective can lead to unraveling the complexities of the phase diagram of cuprate high-critical-temperature superconductors.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2011

Electrodynamics of Abrikosov vortices: the Field Theoretical Formulation

Electrodynamic phenomena related to vortices in superconductors have been studied since their prediction by Abrikosov, and seem to hold no fundamental mysteries. However, most of the effects are treated separately, with no guiding principle. We demonstrate that the relativistic vortex worldsheet in spacetime is the object that naturally conveys all electric and magnetic information, for which we obtain simple and concise equations. Breaking Lorentz invariance leads to down-to-earth Abrikosov vortices, and special limits of these equations include for instance dynamic Meissner screening and the AC Josephson relation. On a deeper level, we explore the electrodynamics of two-form sources in the absence of electric monopoles, in which the electromagnetic field strength itself acquires the characteristics of a gauge field. This novel framework leaves room for unexpected surprises.

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arXiv2010

Mesoscopic transport in ultrathin films of La$_{0.67}$Ca$_{0.33}$MnO$_3$

We investigate the electrical transport in mesoscopic structures of La$_{0.67}$Ca$_{0.33}$MnO$_3$ in the regime of the metal-insulator transition by fabricating microbridges from strained and unstrained thin films. We measure current-voltage characteristics as function of temperature and in high magnetic fields and with varying film thickness. For strained films, in warming from the metallic to the insulating state, we find non-linear effects in the steep part of the transition characterized by a differential resistance with a strong peak around zero applied current, and saturating at higher currents after resistance drops up to 60 %. We propose that this nonlinear behavior is associated with melting of the insulating state by injecting charge carriers, signalling the occurrence of an intervening phase which involves the formation of short range polaron correlations.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2010

Condensing Nielsen-Olesen strings and the vortex-boson duality in 3+1 and higher dimensions

The vortex-boson (or Abelian-Higgs, XY) duality in 2+1 dimensions demonstrates that the quantum disordered superfluid is equivalent to an ordered superconductor and the other way around. Such a duality structure should be ubiquitous but in 3+1 (and higher) dimensions a precise formulation of the duality is lacking. The problem is that the topological defects become extended objects, strings in 3+1D. We argue how the condensate of such vortex strings must behave from the known physics of the disordered superfluid, namely the Bose-Mott insulator. A flaw in earlier proposals is repaired, and a more direct viewpoint, avoiding gauge fields, in terms of the physical supercurrent is laid out, that also easily generalizes to higher-dimensional and more complicated systems. Furthermore topological defects are readily identified; we demonstrate that the Bose-Mott insulator supports line defects, which may be seen in cold atom experiments.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2010

A Systematic Study of Electron-Phonon Coupling to Oxygen Modes Across the Cuprates

The large variations of T$_c$ across the cuprate families is one of the major unsolved puzzles in condensed matter physics, and is poorly understood. Although there appears to be a great deal of universality in the cuprates, several orders of magnitude changes in T$_c$ can be achieved through changes in the chemical composition and structure of the unit cell. In this paper we formulate a systematic examination of the variations in electron-phonon coupling to oxygen phonons in the cuprates, incorporating a number of effects arising from several aspects of chemical composition and doping across cuprate families. It is argued that the electron-phonon coupling is a very sensitive probe of the material-dependent variations of chemical structure, affecting the orbital character of the band crossing the Fermi level, the strength of local electric fields arising from structural-induced symmetry breaking, doping dependent changes in the underlying band structure, and ionicity of the crystal governing the ability of the material to screen $c$-axis perturbations. Using electrostatic Ewald calculations and known experimental structural data, we establish a connection between the material's maximal T$_c$ at optimal doping and the strength of coupling to $c$-axis modes. We demonstrate that materials with the largest coupling to the out-of-phase bond-buckling (``$B_{1g}$") oxygen phonon branch also have the largest T$_c$'s. In light of this observation we present model T$_c$ calculations using a two-well model where phonons work in conjunction with a dominant pairing interaction, presumably due to spin fluctuations, indicating how phonons can generate sizeable enhancements to T$_c$ despite the relatively small coupling strengths. Combined, these results can provide a natural framework for understanding the doping and material dependence of T$_c$ across the cuprates.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2010

Strong energy-momentum dispersion of phonon-dressed carriers in the lightly doped band insulator SrTiO$_3$

Much progress has been made recently in the study of the effects of electron-phonon (el-ph) coupling in doped insulators using angle resolved photoemission (ARPES), yielding evidence for the dominant role of el-ph interactions in underdoped cuprates. As these studies have been limited to doped Mott insulators, the important question arises how this compares with doped band insulators where similar el-ph couplings should be at work. The archetypical case is the perovskite SrTiO$_3$ (STO), well known for its giant dielectric constant of 10000 at low temperature, exceeding that of La$_2$CuO$_4$ by a factor of 500. Based on this fact, it has been suggested that doped STO should be the archetypical bipolaron superconductor. Here we report an ARPES study from high-quality surfaces of lightly doped SrTiO$_3$. Comparing to lightly doped Mott insulators, we find the signatures of only moderate electron-phonon coupling: a dispersion anomaly associated with the low frequency optical phonon with a $λ'\sim0.3$ and an overall bandwidth renormalization suggesting an overall $λ'\sim0.7$ coming from the higher frequency phonons. Further, we find no clear signatures of the large pseudogap or small polaron phenomena. These findings demonstrate that a large dielectric constant itself is not a good indicator of el-ph coupling and highlight the unusually strong effects of the el-ph coupling in doped Mott insulators.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2009

Mottness collapse and statistical quantum criticality

We forward here the case that the anomalous electron states found in cuprate superconductors and related systems are rooted in a deeply non-classical fermion sign structure. The collapse of Mottness as advocated by Phillips and supported by recent DCA results on the Hubbard model is setting the necessary microscopic conditions. The crucial insight is due to Weng who demonstrated that in the presence of Mottness the fundamental workings of quantum statistics changes and we will elaborate on the effects of this Weng statistics with an emphasis on characterizing these further using numerical methods. The pseudogap physics of the underdoped regime appears as a consequence of the altered statistics and the profound question is how to connect this by a continuous quantum phase transition to the overdoped regime ruled by normal Fermi-Dirac statistics. Proof of principle follows from Ceperley's constrained path integral formalism where states can be explicitly constructed showing a merger of Fermi-Dirac sign structure and scale invariance of the quantum dynamics.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2009

The specific heat jump at the superconducting transition and the quantum critical nature of the normal state of Pnictide superconductors

Recently it was discovered that the jump in the specific heat at the superconducting transition in pnictide superconductors is proportional to the superconducting transition temperature to the third power, with the superconducting transition temperature varying from 2 to 25 Kelvin including underdoped and overdoped cases. Relying on standard scaling notions for the thermodynamics of strongly interacting quantum critical states, it is pointed out that this behavior is consistent with a normal state that is a quantum critical metal undergoing a pairing instability.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2009

Ballistic properties of crystalline defects

We introduce a field theoretic formalism enabling the direct study of dislocation and interstitial dynamics. Explicit expressions for the energies of such defects are given. We provide links to earlier numerical, discrete elastic, time dependent Ginzburg Landau, and other approaches sought by numerous authors for the problem of defect dynamics. The formalism introduced in this article may be extended to address many other systems. Apart from their heavily studied role in dislocation mediated crystal melting, defect dynamics recently gained much interest due to their viable role in various electronic and other systems of current interest. These systems include, yet are not limited to, stripe phases of Quantum Hall liquids, theories addressing the melting of stripe phases in various doped oxides (including the high temperature cuprate superconductors, the nickelates, and manganates), defects in supersolids, as well as colloidal crystals.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2009

Phase diagram of the frustrated, spatially anisotropic S=1 antiferromagnet on a square lattice

We study the S=1 square lattice Heisenberg antiferromagnet with spatially anisotropic nearest neighbor couplings $J_{1x}$, $J_{1y}$ frustrated by a next-nearest neighbor coupling $J_{2}$ numerically using the density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) method and analytically employing the Schwinger-Boson mean-field theory (SBMFT). Up to relatively strong values of the anisotropy, within both methods we find quantum fluctuations to stabilize the Néel ordered state above the classically stable region. Whereas SBMFT suggests a fluctuation-induced first order transition between the Néel state and a stripe antiferromagnet for $1/3\leq J_{1x}/J_{1y}\leq 1$ and an intermediate paramagnetic region opening only for very strong anisotropy, the DMRG results clearly demonstrate that the two magnetically ordered phases are separated by a quantum disordered region for all values of the anisotropy with the remarkable implication that the quantum paramagnetic phase of the spatially isotropic $J_{1}$-$J_{2}$ model is continuously connected to the limit of decoupled Haldane spin chains. Our findings indicate that for S=1 quantum fluctuations in strongly frustrated antiferromagnets are crucial and not correctly treated on the semiclassical level.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2008

Spin-orbital frustrations and anomalous metallic state in iron-pnictide superconductors

We develop an understanding of the anomalous metal state of the parent compounds of recently discovered iron based superconductors starting from a strong coupling viewpoint, including orbital degrees of freedom. On the basis of an intermediate-spin (S=1) state for the Fe^{2+} ions, we derive a Kugel-Khomskii spin-orbital Hamiltonian for the active t_{2g} orbitals. It turns out to be a highly complex model with frustrated spin and orbital interactions. We compute its classical phase diagrams and provide an understanding for the stability of the various phases by investigating its spin-only and orbital-only limits. The experimentally observed spin-stripe state is found to be stable over a wide regime of physical parameters and can be accompanied by three different types of orbital orders. Of these the orbital-ferro and orbital-stripe orders are particularly interesting since they break the in-plane lattice symmetry -- a robust feature of the undoped compounds. We compute the magnetic excitation spectra for the effective spin Hamiltonian, observing a strong reduction of the ordered moment, and point out that the proposed orbital ordering pattern can be measured in resonant X-ray diffraction.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2008

Heavy anion solvation of polarity fluctuations in Pnictides

Once again the condensed matter world has been surprised by the discovery of yet another class of high temperature superconductors. The discovery of iron-pnictide (FeAs) and chalcogenide (FeSe) based superconductors with a $T_c$ of up to 55 K is again evidence of how complex the many body problem really is, or in another view how resourceful nature is. The first reactions would of course be that these new materials must in some way be related to the copper-oxide based superconductors for which a large number of theories exist although a general consensus regarding the correct theory has not yet been reached. Here we point out that the basic physical paradigm of the new iron based superconductors is entirely different from the cuprates. Their fundamental properties, structural and electronic, are dominated by the exceptionally large pnictide polarizabilities.

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arXiv2008

Charge dynamics of doped holes in high Tc cuprates - A clue from optical conductivity

The charge dynamics in weakly hole doped high temperature superconductors is studied in terms of the accurate numerical solution to a model of a single hole interacting with a quantum lattice in an antiferromagnetic background, and accurate far-infrared ellipsometry measurements. The experimentally observed two electronic bands in the infrared spectrum can be identified in terms of the interplay between the electron correlation and electron-phonon interaction resolving the long standing mystery of the mid-infrared band.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2008

Pacifying the Fermi-liquid: battling the devious fermion signs

The fermion sign problem is studied in the path integral formalism. The standard picture of Fermi liquids is first critically analyzed, pointing out some of its rather peculiar properties. The insightful work of Ceperley in constructing fermionic path integrals in terms of constrained world-lines is then reviewed. In this representation, the minus signs associated with Fermi-Dirac statistics are self consistently translated into a geometrical constraint structure (the {\em nodal hypersurface}) acting on an effective bosonic dynamics. As an illustrative example we use this formalism to study 1+1-dimensional systems, where statistics are irrelevant, and hence the sign problem can be circumvented. In this low-dimensional example, the structure of the nodal constraints leads to a lucid picture of the entropic interaction essential to one-dimensional physics. Working with the path integral in momentum space, we then show that the Fermi gas can be understood by analogy to a Mott insulator in a harmonic trap. Going back to real space, we discuss the topological properties of the nodal cells, and suggest a new holographic conjecture relating Fermi liquids in higher dimensions to soft-core bosons in one dimension. We also discuss some possible connections between mixed Bose/Fermi systems and supersymmetry.

cond-mat.other↗

arXiv2008

On the sign structure of doped Mott insulators

We demonstrate that the sign structure of the t-J model on a hypercubic lattice is entirely different from that of a Fermi gas, by inspecting the high temperature expansion of the partition function up to all orders, as well as the multi-hole propagator of the half-filled state and the perturbative expansion of the ground state energy. We show that while the fermion signs can be completely gauged away by a Marshall sign transformation at half-filling, the bulk of the signs can be also gauged away in a doped case, leaving behind a rarified "irreducible" sign structure that can be enumerated easily by counting exchanges of holes with themselves and spins on their real space paths. Such a sparse sign structure implies a mutual statistics for the quantum states of the doped Mott insulator.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2007

Polaron Coherence Condensation as the Mechanism for Colossal Magnetoresistance in Layered Manganites

Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy data for the bilayer manganite La1.2Sr1.8Mn2O7 show that, upon lowering the temperature below the Curie point, a coherent polaronic metallic groundstate emerges very rapidly with well defined quasiparticles which track remarkably well the electrical conductivity, consistent with macroscopic transport properties. Our data suggest that the mechanism leading to the insulator-to-metal transition in La1.2Sr1.8Mn2O7 can be regarded as a polaron coherence condensation process acting in concert with the Double Exchange interaction.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2007

Inhomogeneous states and nodal fermions in the SU(2) gauge theory

We discuss the issue of phase separation in the SU(2) slave boson theory of Wen and Lee of the doped Mott insulator. It is shown that the constraint structure of the theory leads to the interpretation of the holons to have hard-core interactions, which is demonstrated further by studying the empty limit (no electrons). Surprisingly, with hard-core interactions even the empty limit is described well by the slave-boson theory, both as an energy density and with the regard to dynamical properties. The consequences are investigated in the overdoped superconducting regime, where both phase separation and a d+s structure of the order parameter is obtained. This s-wave component is already imminent in the description of the hole in the slave boson theory. The interacting nature of the holons also lead to sound modes in the single-electron propagator. The novel idea of the isospin spiral is introduced, based on the projective symmetry principles of Wen. This isospin spiral explains the coexistence of superconductivity and the Mott insulating state, being the consequence of phase separation. Secondly, it might be able to explain why nodal fermions survive in the presence of charge inhomogeneities.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2007

Magnetic fluctuations in n-type high-$T_c$ superconductors reveal breakdown of fermiology

By combining experimental measurements of the quasiparticle and dynamical magnetic properties of optimally electron-doped Pr$_{0.88}$LaCe$_{0.12}$CuO$_4$ with theoretical calculations we demonstrate that the conventional fermiology approach cannot possibly account for the magnetic fluctuations in these materials. In particular, we perform tunneling experiments on the very same sample for which a dynamical magnetic resonance has been reported recently and use photoemission data by others on a similar sample to characterize the fermionic quasiparticle excitations in great detail. We subsequently use this information to calculate the magnetic response within the conventional fermiology framework as applied in a large body of work for the hole-doped superconductors to find a profound disagreement between the theoretical expectations and the measurements: this approach predicts a step-like feature rather than a sharp resonance peak, it underestimates the intensity of the resonance by an order of magnitude, it suggests an unreasonable temperature dependence of the resonance, and most severely, it predicts that most of the spectral weight resides in incommensurate wings which are a key feature of the hole-doped cuprates but have never been observed in the electron-doped counterparts. Our findings strongly suggest that the magnetic fluctuations reflect the quantum-mechanical competition between antiferromagnetic and superconducting orders.

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