Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Philip Phillips

Publications and source records attributed to Philip Phillips.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2011

Magnon-Mediated Pairing and Isotope Effect in Iron-based Superconductors

Within a minimal model for the iron-based superconductors in which itinerant electrons interact with a band of local moments, we derive a a general conclusion for multi-band superconductivity. In a multi-band superconductor, due to the Adler theorem, the inter-band scattering dominates the intra-band scattering at the long wave length limit as long as both interactions are induced by Goldstone boson (which is magnon in our case) and the transfered momentum is nonzero. Such kind of interaction leads to a well-known sigh-reversing superconductivity even if the inter-band and intra-band interaction are repulsive. This effect can be modeled as arising from an internal Josephson link between the Fermi surface sheets. Our model is also consistent with the recently discovered coexistence of superconductivity and magnetic order in iron-pnictides. Although the experimentally observed isotope effect is large, $α=0.4$, we show that it is consistent with a non-phononic mechanism in which it is the isotope effects result in a change in the lattice constant and as a consequence the zero-point motion of the Fe atoms.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2010

Fractionalize This

Precisely what are the electrons in a high-temperature superconductor doing before they superconduct? Strong electronic correlations may give rise to composite rather than fractionalized excitations, as is typical in other strongly coupled systems such as quark matter.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2010

Emergence of Particle-Hole Symmetry near Optimal Doping in High-Temperature Copper Oxide Superconductors

High-temperature copper oxide superconductors (cuprates) display unconventional physics when they are lightly doped whereas the standard theory of metals prevails in the opposite regime. For example, the thermoelectric power, that is the voltage that develops across a sample in response to a temperature gradient, changes sign abruptly near optimal doping in a wide class of cuprates, a stark departure from the standard theory of metals in which the thermopower vanishes only when one electron exists per site. We show that this effect arises from proximity to a state in which particle-hole symmetry is dynamically generated. The operative mechanism is dynamical spectral weight transfer from states that lie at least 2eV away from the chemical potential. We show that the sign change is reproduced quantitatively within the Hubbard model for moderate values of the on-site repulsion, $U$. For sufficiently large values of on-site repulsion, for example, $U=20t$, ($t$ the hopping matrix element), dynamical spectral weight transfer attenuates and our calculated results for the thermopower are in prefect agreement with exact atomic limit. The emergent particle-hole symmetry close to optimal doping points to pairing in the cuprates being driven by high-energy electronic states.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2010

Orbital Ordering and Unfrustrated $(π,0)$ Magnetism from Degenerate Double Exchange in the Iron Pnictides

The magnetic excitations of the iron pnictides are explained within a degenerate double-exchange model. The local-moment spins are coupled by superexchanges $J_1$ and $J_2$ between nearest and next-nearest neighbors, respectively, and interact with the itinerant electrons of the degenerate $d_{xz}$ and $d_{yz}$ orbitals via a ferromagnetic Hund exchange. The latter stabilizes $(π,0)$ stripe antiferromagnetism due to emergent ferro-orbital order and the resulting kinetic energy gain by hopping preferably along the ferromagnetic spin direction. Taking the quantum nature of the spins into account, we calculate the magnetic excitation spectra in the presence of both, super- and double-exchange. A dramatic increase of the spin-wave energies at the competing Néel ordering wave vector is found, in agreement with recent neutron scattering data. The spectra are fitted to a spin-only model with a strong spatial anisotropy and additional longer ranged couplings along the ferromagnetic chains. Over a realistic parameter range, the effective couplings along the chains are negative corresponding to unfrustrated stripe antiferromagnetism.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2010

Non-conservation of Fermionic Degrees of Freedom at Low-energy in Doped Mott Insulators

Hall and optical conductivity experiments on the cuprates indicate that the low-energy fermionic degrees of freedom in a doped Mott insulator posess a component that is dynamcially generated and hence determined by the temperature. We show explicitly how the spectrum in the lower Hubbard band should be partitioned to describe such dynamically generated charge degrees of freedom and corroborate this picture with the results from the exact low-energy theory of the Hubbard model. A consequence of such dynamics is that the Landau one-to-one correspondence between bare electrons and the effective fermionic degrees of freedom at low energies breaks down explicitly. This state of affairs obtains because the total hole number is not conserved as it contains a dynamical contribution. We propose that any experimental probe that couples to the low-energy dynamics of a doped Mott insulator, quantum oscillation experiments included, should be interpreted in terms of the total dynamically generated hole number rather than the bare value.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2010

Comment on "Measurement of x-ray absorption spectra of overdoped high-temperature cuprate superconductors: Inapplicability of the single-band Hubbard model"

In a recent Letter, Peets, et al. measured the x-ray intensity at the oxygen K-edge in overdoped La$_{2-x}$Sr$_x$CuO$_{4\pmδ}$ (LSCO) and Tl$_2$Ba$_2$CuO$_{6+δ}$. They claimed that, unlike the underdoped samples of LSCO and YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_x$ in which the integrated intensity increases at least linearly with doping, it saturates abruptly for a hole count exceeding $x\approx 0.23$. They interpreted the saturation as a breakdown of the 1-band Hubbard model in the cuprates. However, we show that their results are in quantitative agreement with the 1-band Hubbard model.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2010

Mottness Collapse and T-linear Resistivity in Cuprate Superconductors

Central to the normal state of cuprate high-temperature superconductors is the collapse of the pseudogap, briefly reviewed here, at a critical point and the subsequent onset of the strange-metal characterized by a resistivity that scales linearly with temperature. A possible clue to the resolution of this problem is the inter-relation between two facts: 1) A robust theory of T-linear resistivity resulting from quantum criticality requires an additional length scale outside the standard 1-parameter scaling scenario and 2) breaking the Landau correspondence between the Fermi gas and an interacting system with short-range repulsions requires non-fermionic degrees. We show that a low-energy theory of the Hubbard model which correctly incorporates dynamical spectral weight transfer has the extra degrees of freedom needed to describe this physics. The degrees of freedom that mix into the lower band as a result of dynamical spectral weight transfer are shown to either decouple beyond a critical doping, thereby signaling Mottness collapse or unbind above a critical temperature yielding strange metal behaviour characterised by $T-$linear resistivity.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2010

Mottness: Identifying the Propagating Charge Modes in doped Mott Insulators

High-temperature superconductivity in the copper-oxide ceramics remains an unsolved problem because we do not know what the propagating degrees of freedom are in the normal state. As a result, we do not know what are the weakly interacting degrees of freedom which pair up to form the superconducting condensate. That the electrons are not the propagating degrees of freedom in the cuprates is seen most directly from experiments that show spectral weight redistributions over all energy scales. Of course, the actual propagating degrees of freedom minimize such spectral rearrangements. This review focuses on the range of epxerimental consequences such UV-IR mixings have on the normal state of the cuprates, such as the pseudogap, mid-infrared band, temperature dependence of the Hall number, the superfluid density, and a recent theoretical advance which permits the identification of the weakly interacting degrees of freedom in a doped Mott insulator. Within this theory, we show how the wide range of phenomena which typify the normal state of the cuprates arises including $T-$linear resistivity.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2009

Orbital-Ordering Induces Structural Phase Transition and the Resistivity Anomaly in Iron Pnictides

We attribute the structural phase transition (SPT) in the parent compounds of the iron pnictides to orbital ordering. Due to the anisotropy of the $d_{xz}$ and $d_{yz}$ orbitals in the $xy$ plane, a ferro-orbital ordering makes the orthorhombic structure more energetically favorable, thus inducing the SPT. In this orbital-ordered system, the sites with orbitals that do not order have higher energies. Scattering of the itinerant electrons by these localized two-level systems causes a resistivity anomaly upon the onset of the SPT. The proposed orbital ordering also leads to the stripe-like anti-ferromagnetism and anisotropy of the magnetic exchanges. This model is quantitatively consistent with available experimental observations.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2009

Reply to Comment on "Signatures of surface states in bismuth at high magnetic fields"

In a Comment [arXiv:0910.1256], Behnia contends that the surface theory put forward in our recent Letter [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 136803 (2009); arXiv:0905.0689] as an alternative explanation of the anomalous peaks observed in Nernst measurement on a single-crystal bismuth sample at high (> 9 T) magnetic fields [Science 317, 1729 (2007); arXiv:0802.1993] is not consistent with the order of magnitude and shape of the anomalous peaks observed in the experiment. We explain in this Reply why this contention is not true.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2009

Anomalous suppression of the Bose glass at commensurate fillings in the disordered Bose-Hubbard model

We study the weakly disordered Bose-Hubbard model on a cubic lattice through a one-loop renormalization group analysis of the corresponding effective field theory which is explicitly derived by combining a strong-coupling expansion with a replica average over the disorder. The method is applied not only to generic uncorrelated on-site disorder but also to simultaneous hopping disorder correlated with the differences of adjacent disorder potentials. Such correlations are inherent in fine-grained optical speckle potentials used as a source of disorder in optical lattice experiments. As a result of strong coupling, the strength of the replica mixing disorder vertex, responsible for the emergence of a Bose glass, crucially depends on the chemical potential and the Hubbard repulsion and vanishes to leading order in the disorder at commensurate boson fillings. As a consequence, at such fillings a direct transition between the Mott-insulator and the superfluid in the presence of disorder cannot be excluded on the basis of a one-loop calculation. At incommensurate fillings, at a certain length scale, the Mott insulator will eventually become unstable towards the formation of a Boss glass. Phase diagrams as a function of the microscopic parameters are presented and the finite-size crossover between the Mott-insulating state and the Bose glass is analyzed.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗
arXiv2009

Origin of the Mott Gap

We show exactly that the only charged excitations that exist in the strong-coupling limit of the half-filled Hubbard model are gapped composite excitations generated by the dynamics of the charge $2e$ boson that appears upon explicit integration of the high-energy scale. At every momentum, such excitations have non-zero spectral weight at two distinct energy scales separated by the on-site repulsion $U$. The result is a gap in the spectrum for the composite excitations accompanied by a discontinuous vanishing of the density of states at the chemical potential when $U$ exceeds the bandwidth. Consequently, we resolve the long-standing problem of the cause of the charge gap in a half-filled band in the absence of symmetry breaking.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2009

Charge 2e Boson Underlies Two - Fluid Model of the Pseudogap in Cuprate Superconductors

Starting from the effective low energy theory of a doped Mott insulator, we show that the effective carrier density in the underdoped regime agrees with a two - fluid description. Namely, it has distinct temperature independent and thermally activated components. We identify the thermally activated component as the bound state of a hole and a charge 2e boson, which occurs naturally in the effective theory. The thermally activated unbinding of this state leads to the strange metal and subsequent $T-$linear resistivity. We find that the doping dependence of the binding energy is in excellent agreement with the experimentally determined pseudogap energy scale in cuprate superconductors.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2009

Mottness in High-Temperature Copper-Oxide Superconductors

The standard theory of metals, Fermi liquid theory, hinges on the key assumption that although the electrons interact, the low-energy excitation spectrum stands in a one-to-one correspondence with that of a non-interacting system. In the normal state of the copper-oxide high-temperature superconductors, drastic deviations from the Fermi liquid picture obtain, highlighted by a pseudogap, broad spectral features and $T-$ linear resistivity. This article focuses on the series of experiments on the copper-oxide superconductors which reveal that the number of low-energy addition states per electron per spin exceeds unity, in direct violation of the key Fermi liquid tenet. These experiments point to new degrees of freedom, not made out of the elemental excitations, as the key mechanism by which Fermi liquid theory breaks down in the cuprates. A recent theoretical advance which permits an explicit integration of the high energy scale in the standard model for the cuprates reveals the source of the new dynamical degrees of freedom at low energies, a charge 2e bosonic field which has nothing to do with pairing but rather represents the mixing with the high energy scales. We demonstrate explicitly that at half-filling, this new degree of freedom provides a dynamical mechanism for the generation of the charge gap, antiferromagnetism in the insulating phase and explains many of the anomalies in the normal state of the cuprates.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2009

Signatures of surface states in bismuth at high magnetic fields

Electrons in a metal subject to magnetic field commonly exhibit oscillatory behavior as the field strength varies, with a period set by the area of quantized electronic orbits. Recent experiments on elemental bismuth have revealed oscillations for fields above 9 tesla that do not follow this simple dependence and have been interpreted as a signature of electron fractionalization in the bulk. We argue instead that a simple explanation in terms of the surface states of bismuth exists when additional features of the experiment are included. These surface electrons are known to have significant spin-orbit interaction. We show the observed oscillations are in quantitative agreement with the surface theory, which we propose to test by studying the effect of the Zeeman coupling in higher fields, dependence on the field orientation, and the thickness of the samples.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2009

Doublon-Holon binding in a half-filled band

The arguments presented in PRL. vol. 102, 056404 (2009) are discussed in the context of the vast literature on spectral weight transfer in doped Mott insulators. We show that the conclusions regarding spectral weight transfer in PRL. vol. 102, 056404 (2009) are, where novel, internally inconsistent and where correct, have been reached at least 18 years ago.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2009

Kinks and Mid-Infrared Optical Conductivity from Strong Electron Correlation

We compute the one-particle spectral function and the optical conductivity for the 2-d Hubbard model on a square lattice. The computational method is cellular dynamical mean-field theory (CDMFT) in which a 4-site Hubbard plaquette is embedded in a self-consistent bath. We obtain a `kink' feature in the dispersion of the spectral function and a mid-infrared (mid-IR) absorption peak in the optical conductivity, consistent with experimental data. Of the 256 plaquette states, only a single state which has d$_{x^2-y^2}$ symmetry contributes to the mid-IR, thereby suggesting a direct link with the pseudogap. Local correlations between doubly and singly occupied sites which lower the kinetic energy of a hole are the efficient cause of this effect.

cond-mat.str-el↗