arXiv subjects

Ting-Kuo Lee

Publications and source records attributed to Ting-Kuo Lee.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Proximity-Induced Nodal Metal in an Extremely Underdoped CuO$_2$ Plane in Triple-Layer Cuprates

ARPES studies have established that the high-$T_c$ cuprates with single and double CuO$_2$ layers evolve from the Mott insulator to the pseudogap state with a Fermi arc, on which the superconducting (SC) gap opens. In four- to six-layer cuprates, on the other hand, small hole Fermi pockets are formed in the innermost CuO$_2$ planes, indicating antiferromagnetism. Here, we performed ARPES studies on the triple-layer Bi$_2$Sr$_2$Ca$_2$Cu$_3$O$_{10+δ}$ over a wide doping range, and found that, although the doping level of the inner CuO$_2$ plane was extremely low in underdoped samples, the $d$-wave SC gap was enhanced to the unprecedentedly large value of $Δ_0\sim$100 meV at the antinode and persisted well above $T_{c}$ without the appearance of a Fermi arc, indicating a robust ``nodal metal''. We attribute the nodal metallic behavior to the unique local environment of the inner clean CuO$_2$ plane in the triple-layer cuprates, sandwiched by nearly optimally-doped two outer CuO$_2$ planes and hence subject to strong proximity effect from both sides. In the nodal metal, quasiparticle peaks showed electron-hole symmetry, suggesting $d$-wave pairing fluctuations. Thus the proximity effect on the innermost CuO${_2}$ plane is the strongest in the triple-layer cuprates, which explains why the $T_c$ reaches the maximum at the layer number of three in every multi-layer cuprate family.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2022

Intertwined Orders and Electronic Structure in Superconducting Vortex Halos

We present a comprehensive study of vortex structures in $d$-wave superconductors from large-scale renormalized mean-field theory of the square-lattice $t$-$t'$-$J$ model, which has been shown to provide a quantitative modeling for high-$T_c$ cuprate superconductors. With an efficient implementation of the kernel polynomial method for solving electronic structures, self-consistent calculations involving up to $10^5$ variational parameters are performed to investigate the vortex solutions on lattices of up to $10^4$ sites. By taking into account the strong correlation of the model, our calculations shed new lights on two puzzling results that have emerged from recent scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) experiments. The first concerns the issue of the zero-biased-conductance peak (ZBCP) at the vortex core for a uniform $d$-wave superconducting state. Despite its theoretical prediction, the ZBCP was not observed in most doping range of cuprates except in heavily over-doped samples at low magnetic field. The second issue is the nature of the checkerboard charge density waves (CDWs) with a period of about 8 unit cells in the vortex halo at optimal doping. Although it has been suggested that such bipartite structure arises from low-energy quasiparticle interference, another intriguing scenario posits that the checkerboard CDWs originate from an underlying bidirectional pair-density wave (PDW) ordering with the same period. We present a coherent interpretation of these experimental results based on systematic studies of the doping and magnetic field effects on vortex solutions with and without a checkerboard structure. The mechanism of the emergent intertwined orders within the vortex halo is also discussed.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2022

Machine learning predictions for local electronic properties of disordered correlated electron systems

We present a scalable machine learning (ML) model to predict local electronic properties such as on-site electron number and double occupation for disordered correlated electron systems. Our approach is based on the locality principle, or the nearsightedness nature, of many-electron systems, which means local electronic properties depend mainly on the immediate environment. A ML model is developed to encode this complex dependence of local quantities on the neighborhood. We demonstrate our approach using the square-lattice Anderson-Hubbard model, which is a paradigmatic system for studying the interplay between Mott transition and Anderson localization. We develop a lattice descriptor based on group-theoretical method to represent the on-site random potentials within a finite region. The resultant feature variables are used as input to a multi-layer fully connected neural network, which is trained from datasets of variational Monte Carlo (VMC) simulations on small systems. We show that the ML predictions agree reasonably well with the VMC data. Our work underscores the promising potential of ML methods for multi-scale modeling of correlated electron systems.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2021

Cubic Dirac and quadruple Weyl points in screw-symmetric materials

High-order topological charge is of intensive interest in the field of topological matters. In real materials, cubic Dirac point is rare and the chiral charge of one Weyl point (WP) has never be found to exceed |C| = 3 for spin- 1/2 electronic systems. In this work, we argue that a cubic Dirac point can result in one quadruple WP (|C| = 4 with double band degeneracy) when time-reversal symmetry is broken, provided that this cubic Dirac point is away from the high-symmetry points and involves coupling of eight bands, rather than four bands that were thought to be sufficient to describe a Dirac point. The eight-band manifold can be realized in materials with screw symmetry. Near the zone boundary along the screw axis, the folded bands are coupled to their "parent" bands, resulting in doubling dimension of the Hilbert space. Indeed, in "$ε$-TaN (space group 194 with screw symmetry) we find a quadruple WP when applying a Zeeman field along the screw axis. This quadruple WP away from high symmetry points is distinct from highly degenerate nodes at the high-symmetry points already reported. We further find that such a high chiral charge might be related to the parity mixing of bands with high degeneracy, which in turn alters the screw eigenvalues and the resulted chiral charge.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2021

Ubiquitous proximity to a critical state for collective neural activity in the CA1 region of freely moving mice

Using miniscope recordings of calcium fluorescence signals in the CA1 region of the hippocampus of mice, we monitor the neural activity of hippocampal regions while the animals are freely moving in an open chamber. Using a data-driven statistical modeling approach, the statistical properties of the recorded data are mapped to spin-glass models with pairwise interactions. Considering the parameter space of the model, the observed system is generally near a critical state between two distinct phases. The close proximity to the criticality is found to be robust against different ways of sampling and segmentation of the measured data. By independently altering the coupling distribution and the network structure of the statistical model, the network structures are found to be vital to maintain the proximity to the critical state. We further find the observed assignment of the coupling strengths makes the net coupling at each site more balanced with slight variation, which likely helps the maintenance of the critical state. Network analysis on the connectivity obtained by thresholding the coupling strengths find the connectivity of the networks to be well described by a random network model. These results are consistent across different experiments, sampling and segmentation choices in our analysis.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2020

Enhancement of maximum superconducting temperature by applying pressure and reducing the charge transfer gap

Recent Scanning Tunneling Spectra(STS) measurement on underdoped cuprate discovers the increase of the maximum superconducting transition temperature $T_c$ when the size of charge transfer gap (CTG) is reduced. Applying pressure is another well known method to increase maximum $T_c$. However, these pressure experiments also found another puzzle that $T_c$ is enhanced in underdoped and optimal doped samples but suppressed in overdoped. Here we present a possible mechanism based on the charge fluctuation to explain both these two effects simultaneously. Starting from 3-band Hubbard model, we retrieve the charge fluctuation(CF) between oxygen 2$p^6$ band and copper 3$d^{10}$ band which is ignored in the $t-J$ model. This model is studied via variational Monte Carlo method(VMC).

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2020

Enhanced quantum oscillations in Kondo insulators

Quantum oscillations have long been regarded as the manifestation of the Fermi surface in metals. However, they were recently observed in Kondo insulators. We examine the Kondo screening due to Landau levels in Kondo insulators. It is shown that even for large Kondo insulating gaps, appreciable amplitudes of quantum oscillations that are consistent with experimental observations are present both in magnetization and resistivity. Specifically, we show that due to the periodic alignment between the Landau levels in the conduction and the f-orbit electrons, the Kondo screening itself undergoes oscillations so that the electronic structure oscillates with the magnetic field. Our results explain main features of quantum oscillations observed in experiments. They indicate that the non-rigidity of the electronic structure results in observable quantum oscillations Kondo insulators. This new effect provides a new way to probe the Fermi surface geometry of insulators.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2020

Slave-rotor theory on magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene

We investigate the correlated electrons in the magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene by using the slave-rotor mean-field theory. Owing to the extended figure of Wannier orbitals, we study the two-orbital cluster Hubbard model with spin-valley fourfold degeneracy, focusing around half filling of valence bands below the neutrality point. The theory predicts multiple Mott insulator phases at fractional fillings not only for integer charges per moir{é} site, and it demonstrates that long-range electron hopping is highly suppressed because multiple-charge excitations are induced. Furthermore, the Kekul{é} valence bond order is investigated and is found to extend the Mott insulator phases to occupy a finite doping region. Adjacent to Mott insulator phases, superconducting domes emerges by virtue of spin-valley fluctuations. This work has provided a primal understanding and interesting phenomena of the correlated system, and for its novel interaction the model might produce plenty of possibilities waiting to be explored.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2019

Unconventional order parameter induced by helical chiral molecules adsorbed on a metal proximity-coupled to a superconductor

Following our previous results, which provide evidence for the emergence of a chiral p-wave triplet-pairing component in superconducting Nb upon the adsorption of chiral molecules, we turned to investigate whether such an effect can take place in a proximal superconductor consisting of metal on superconductor bilayer. Note that in such proximity systems, correlated electron-hole (Andreev) pairs exist in the normal metal rather than genuine Cooper pairs. To that end, we used scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) on thin Au films grown in-situ on NbN (a conventional s-wave superconductor) before and after adsorbing helical chiral, alpha-helix polyalanine molecules. The tunneling spectra measured on the pristine Au surface showed conventional (s-wave like) proximity gaps. However, upon molecules adsorption the spectra significantly changed, all exhibiting a zero-bias conductance peak embedded inside a gap, indicating unconventional superconductivity. The peak reduced with magnetic field but did not split, consistent with equal-spin triplet-pairing p-wave symmetry. In contrast, adsorption of non-helical chiral cysteine molecules did not yield any apparent change in the order parameter, and the tunneling spectra exhibited only gaps free of in-gap structure.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2018

Evolution of Pairing Orders between Pseudogap and Superconducting Phases of Cuprate Superconductors

One of the most puzzling problems of high temperature cuprate superconductor is the pseudogap phase(PG) at temperatures above the superconducting transition temperature in the underdoped regime. The PG phase is found by the angle-resolved photoemission spectra(ARPES) to have a gap at some regions in momentum space and a fraction of Fermi surface remained, known as Fermi arcs. The arc turns into a d-wave SC gap with a node below the SC transition temperature. Here, by studying a strongly correlated model at low temperatures, we obtained a phase characterized by two kinds of pairing order parameters with the total momentum of the Cooper pair to be zero and finite. The finite momentum pairing is accompanied with a spatial modulation of pairing order, i.e. a pair density wave (PDW). These PDW phases are intertwined with modulations of charge density and intra-unit cell form factors. The coexistence of the two different pairing orders provides the unique two-gaps like spectra observed by ARPES for superconducting cuprates. As temperature raises, the zero momentum pairing order vanishes while the finite momentum pairing orders are kept, thus Fermi arcs are realized. The calculated quasiparticle spectra has the similar doping and temperature dependence as reported by ARPES and scanning tunneling spectroscopy(STS). The consequence of breaking symmetry between x and y due to the unidirectional PDW and the possibility to probe such a PDW state in the PG phase is discussed.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2018

Strain induced superconducting pair-density-wave states in graphene

Graphene is known to be non-superconducting. However, surprising superconductivity is recently discovered in a flat-band in a twisted bi-layer graphene. Here we show that superconductivity can be more easily realized in topological flat-bands induced by strain in graphene through periodic ripples. Specifically, it is shown that by including correlation effects, the chiral d-wave superconductivity can be stabilized under strain even for slightly doped graphene. The chiral d-wave superconductivity generally coexists with charge density waves (CDW) and pair density waves (PDW) of the same period. Remarkably, a pure PDW state with doubled period that coexists with the CDW state is found to emerge at a finite temperature region under reasonable strain strength. The emergent PDW state is shown to be superconducting with non-vanishing superfluid density, and it realizes the long searched superconducting states with non-vanishing center of mass momentum for Cooper pairs.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2018

Emergence of topological phases from the extension of two-dimensional lattice with nonsymmorphic symmetries

Young and Kane have given a great insight for 2D Dirac semimetals with nontrivial topology in the presence of nonsymmorphic crystalline symmetry. Based on one of 2D nonsymmorphic square lattice structures they proposed, we further construct a set of 3D minimal tight-binding models via vertically stacking the 2D nonsymmorphic lattice. Specifically, our model provides a platform to generate three topologically semimetallic phases such as Dirac nodal line semimetals, Weyl nodal line semimetals and Weyl semimetals. The off-centered mirror symmetry sufficiently protects nodal lines emerging within mirror-invariant plane with a nontrivial mirror invariant $n_{M\mathbb{Z}}$, whereas twofold screw rotational symmetry protects nontrivial Weyl nodal points with topological charge $C=2$. Interestingly, Weyl nodal loops are generated without mirror symmetry protection, where nontrivial "drumhead" surface states emerge within loops. In the presence of both time-reversal and inversion symmetries, the emergence of weak topological insulator phases is discussed as well.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2017

Revisit of Antiferromagnetism in Hubbard Model by A Cluster Slave-Spin Method

The cluster slave-spin method is introduced to systematically investigate the solutions of the Hubbard model including the symmetry-broken phases. In this method, the electron operator is factorized into a fermioninc spinon describing the physical spin and a slave-spin describing the charge fluctuations. Following the $U(1)$ formalism derived by Yu and Si [Phys. Rev. B 86, 085104 (2012)], it is shown that the self-consistent equations to explore various symmetry-broken density wave states can be constructed in general with a cluster of multiple slave-spin sites. We employ this method to study the antiferromagnetic (AFM) state in the single band Hubbard model with the two and four-site clusters of slave spins. While the Hubbard gap, the charge gap due to the doubly-occupied states, scales with the Hubbard interaction $U$ as expected, the AFM gap $Δ$, the gap in the spinon dispersion in the AFM state, exhibits a crossover from the weak to strong-coupling behaviors as $U$ increases. Our cluster slave-spin method reproduces not only the traditional mean-field behavior of $Δ\sim U$ in the weak-coupling limit, but also the behavior of $Δ\sim t^2/U$ predicted by the superexchange mechanism in the strong coupling limit. In addition, the holon-doublon correlator as functions of $U$ and doping $x$ is also computed, which exhibits a strong tendency toward the holon-doublon binding in the strong coupling regime. We further show that the quasiparticle weight obtained by the cluster slave-spin method is in a good agreement with the generalized Gutzwiller approximation in both AFM and paramagnetic states, and the results can be improved beyond the generalized Gutzwiller approximation as the cluster is enlarged from a single site to 4 sites. Our results demonstrate that the cluster slave-spin method can be a powerful tool to systematically investigate the strongly correlated system.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2017

Momentum analyticity of the holographic electric polarizability in 2+1 dimensions

The static electric polarization of a holographic field theory dual to the Einstein-Maxwell theory in the background of $AdS_4$ with a Reissner-Nordstöm (AdS-RN) black hole is investigated. We prove that the holographic polarization is a meromorphic functions in complex momentum plane and locate analytically the asymptotic distribution of the poles along two straight lines parallel to the imaginary axis for a large momentum magnitude. The results are compared with the numerical result on Friedel-like poles of the same holographic model reported in the literature and with the momentum singularities of the one-loop polarization in weak-coupling spinor QED$_3$ and scalar QED$_3$ with the similarities and differences discussed.

hep-th↗

arXiv2016

Incommensurate charge ordered states in the $\mathit{t-t^{\prime}-J}$ model

We study the incommensurate charge ordered states in the $\mathit{t-t^{\prime}-J}$ model using the Gutzwiller mean field theory on large systems. In particular, we explore the properties of incommensurate charge modulated states referred to as nodal pair density waves (nPDW) in the literature. nPDW states intertwine site and bond charge order with modulated $d$-wave pair order, and are characterized by a nonzero amplitude of uniform pairing; they also manifest a dominant intra-unit cell $d$-density wave form factor. To compare with a recent scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) study [Hamidian \textit{et al.}, Nat. Phys. 3519 (2015)] of the cuprate superconductor BSCCO-2212, we compute the continuum local density of states (LDOS) at a typical STM tip height using the Wannier function based approach. By Fourier transforming Cu and O sub-lattice LDOS we also obtain bias-dependent intra-unit cell form factors and spatial phase difference. We find that in the nPDW state the behavior of form factors and spatial phase difference as a function of energy agrees remarkably well with the experiment. This is in contrast to commensurate charge modulated states, which we show do not agree with experiment. We propose that the nPDW states are good candidates for the charge density wave phase observed in the superconducting state of underdoped cuprates.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2016

Spectral evolution with doping of an antiferromagnetic Mott state

Since the discovery of half-filled cuprate to be a Mott insulator, the excitation spectra above the chemical potential for the unoccupied states has attracted many research attentions. There were many theoretical works using different numerical techniques to study this problem, but many have reached different conclusions. One of the reasons is the lack of very detailed high-resolution experimental results for the theories to be compared with. Recently, the scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS)\cite{cai2015visualizing,ye2013visualizing} on lightly doped Mott insulator with an antiferromagnetic (AFM) order found the presence of in-gap states with energy of order half an eV above the chemical potential. The measured spectral properties with doping are not quite consistent with earlier theoretical works. In this paper we perform a diagonalization method on top of the variational Monte Carlo (VMC) calculation to study the evolution of AFM Mott state with doped hole concentration in the Hubbard model (HM). Our results found in-gap states that behave similarly with ones reported by STS. These in-gap states acquire a substantial amount of dynamical spectral weight transferred from the upper Hubbard band. The in-gap states move toward chemical potential with increasing spectral weight as doping increases. Our result also provides information about the energy scale of these in-gap states in relation with the coulomb coupling strength U.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2016

Emergence of fermionic finite-temperature critical point in a Kondo lattice

The underlying Dirac point is central to the profound physics manifested in a wide class of materials. However, it is often difficult to drive a system with Dirac points across the massless fermionic critical point. Here by exploiting screening of local moments under spin-orbit interactions in a Kondo lattice, we show that below the Kondo temperature, the Kondo lattice undergoes a topological transition from a strong topological insulator to a weak topological insulator at a finite temperature $T_D$. At $T_D$, massless Dirac points emerge and the Kondo lattice becomes a Dirac semimetal. Our analysis indicates that the emergent relativistic symmetry dictates non-trivial thermal responses over large parameter and temperature regimes. In particular, it yields critical scaling behaviors both in magnetic and transport responses near $T_D$.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2016

Signatures of strong correlation effects in RIXS on Cuprates

Recently, spin excitations in doped cuprates are measured using the resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS). The paramagnon dispersions show the large hardening effect in the electron-doped systems and seemingly doping-independence in the hole-doped systems, with the energy scales comparable to that of the antiferromagnetic magnons. This anomalous hardening effect was partially explained by using the strong coupling t-J model but with a three-site term(Nature communications 5, 3314 (2014)). However we show that hardening effect is a signature of strong coupling physics even without including this extra term. By considering the t-t'-t"-J model and using the Slave-Boson (SB) mean field theory, we obtain, via the spin-spin susceptibility, the spin excitations in qualitative agreement with the experiments. These anomalies is mainly due to the doping-dependent bandwidth. We further discuss the interplay between particle-hole-like and paramagnon-like excitations in the RIXS measurements.

cond-mat.str-el↗