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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen
TT 36: Superconductivity: Theory I
TT 36.9: Vortrag
Mittwoch, 20. März 2024, 11:45–12:00, H 3005
Superconductivity due to fluctuating loop currents — Grgur Palle1, •Risto Ojajärvi1, Rafael M. Fernandez2, and Jörg Schmalian1,3 — 1Institute for Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany — 2School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA — 3Institute for Quantum Materials and Technologies, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany
Orbital magnetism and the loop currents (LC) that accompany it have been proposed to emerge in many systems, including cuprates, iridates, and kagome superconductors. In the case of cuprates, LCs have been put forward as the driving force behind the pseudogap, strange-metal behavior, and dx2−y2-wave superconductivity. Here, we investigate whether fluctuating intra-unit-cell loop currents can cause unconventional superconductivity. For odd-parity LCs, we find that they are strongly repulsive in all pairing channels near the underlying quantum-critical point (QCP). For even-parity LCs, their fluctuations do give rise to unconventional pairing. However, this pairing is not amplified in the vicinity of the QCP, in sharp contrast to other known cases of pairing mediated by intra-unit-cell order parameters, such as spin-magnetic, nematic, or ferroelectric ones. Applying our formalism to the cuprates, we conclude that pairing mediated by fluctuating intra-unit-cell LCs is unlikely to yield dx2−y2-wave superconductivity. We also show that loop currents, if relevant for the cuprates, must vary between unit cells and break translation symmetry.
Keywords: Orbital magnetism; Loop currents; Quantum critical point; Unconventional pairing; Cuprates