Physics and Astronomy Calendar

The generation of an effective attraction between electrons out of the bare Coulomb repulsion is a long sought-after goal of the condensed matter community. In this talk I will introduce a pairing mechanism between holes in the dilute limit of doped frustrated Mott insulators. We will see that magnons provide a strong glue in the infinitely repulsive limit of the triangular lattice Hubbard model. The strongly attractive hole-magnon interaction is a manifestation of a “counter-Nagaoka” theorem: the single-hole kinetic energy is minimized for an antiferromagnetically ordered state. We will demonstrate that the resulting hole-magnon attraction is strong enough to bind a second hole and to form a hole-hole-magnon three-body bound state. Remarkably, the binding energy of this “composite Cooper pair” is rather strong, while its effective mass still has a moderate value, giving rise to relatively high transition temperature for superconductivity in the dilute limit. I will discuss a few interesting consequences of this new mechanism for unconventional superconductivity.

Work done in collaboration with Shangshun Zhang (University of Tennessee) and Wei Zhu (Los Alamos National Laboratory).