Light Bipolarons Stabilized by Peierls Electron-Phonon Coupling

John Sous, Monodeep Chakraborty, Roman V. Krems, and Mona Berciu
Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 247001 – Published 11 December 2018

Abstract

It is widely accepted that phonon-mediated high-temperature superconductivity is impossible at ambient pressure, because of the very large effective masses of polarons or bipolarons at strong electron-phonon coupling. Here we challenge this belief by showing that strongly bound yet very light bipolarons appear for strong Peierls coupling. These bipolarons also exhibit many other unconventional properties; e.g., at strong coupling there are two low-energy bipolaron bands that are stable against strong Coulomb repulsion. Using numerical simulations and analytical arguments, we show that these properties result from the specific form of the phonon-mediated interaction, which is of “pair hopping” instead of regular density-density type. This unusual effective interaction is bound to have nontrivial consequences for the superconducting state expected to arise at finite carrier concentrations and should favor a large critical temperature.

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  • Received 3 March 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.247001

© 2018 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

John Sous1,2,3,4,5,*, Monodeep Chakraborty6, Roman V. Krems2, and Mona Berciu1,3,†

  • 1Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z1, Canada
  • 2Department of Chemistry, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z1, Canada
  • 3Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z4, Canada
  • 4ITAMP, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
  • 5Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
  • 6Centre for Theoretical Studies, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India

  • *jsous@phas.ubc.ca
  • berciu@phas.ubc.ca

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Issue

Vol. 121, Iss. 24 — 14 December 2018

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