Superconductivity and charge density wave order in the two-dimensional Holstein model

Abstract

The Holstein Hamiltonian describes fermions hopping on a lattice and interacting locally with dispersionless phonon degrees of freedom. In the low-density limit, dressed quasiparticles, polarons and bipolarons, propagate with an effective mass. At higher densities, pairs can condense into a low-temperature superconducting phase and, at or near commensurate filling on a bipartite lattice, to charge density wave (CDW) order. CDW formation breaks a discrete symmetry and hence occurs via a second-order (Ising) transition and therefore at a finite Tcdw in two dimensions. Quantum Monte Carlo calculations have determined Tcdw for a variety of geometries, including square, honeycomb, and Lieb lattices. The superconducting transition, on the other hand, in d=2 is in the Kosterlitz-Thouless universality class and is much less well characterized. In this paper we determine Tsc for the square lattice for several values of the density ρ and phonon frequency ω0. We find that quasilong-range order sets in at Tsc≲t/20, where t is the near-neighbor hopping amplitude, consistent with previous rough estimates from simulations which extrapolated to only the temperatures we reach from considerably higher T. We also show evidence of a discontinuous evolution of the density as the CDW transition is approached at half filling.

Source-reported materials — not catalogue approval

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