Publications

The identification of novel mechanisms for superconductivity is a longstanding goal in theoretical physics. In this work, we argue that the combination of repulsive interactions and high magnetic fields can generate electron pairing, phase coherence and superconductivity. Inspired by the large lattice constants of moiré materials, which make large flux per unit cell accessible at laboratory fields, we study the triangular lattice Hofstadter-Hubbard model at one-quarter flux quantum per plaquette, where previous literature has argued that a chiral spin liquid separates a weak-coupling integer quantum Hall phase and a strong-coupling topologically-trivial Mott insulator. We argue that topological superconductivity emerges upon doping in the vicinity of the integer quantum Hall to chiral spin liquid transition. We employ exact diagonalization and density matrix renormalization group methods to examine this theoretical scenario and find that electronic pairing indeed occurs above the half-filled ground states not just near the putative critical point but over a remarkably broad range of coupling strengths on both sides of criticality. On the chiral spin liquid side, our results provide a concrete model realization of the storied mechanism of anyon superconductivity. Our study thus establishes a beyond-BCS mechanism for electron pairing in a well-controlled limit, relying crucially on the interplay between electron correlations and band topology.

Strong laser pulses can control superconductivity, inducing non-equilibrium transient pairing by leveraging strong-light matter interaction. Here we demonstrate theoretically that equilibrium ground-state phonon-mediated superconductive pairing can be affected through the vacuum fluctuating electromagnetic field in a cavity. Using the recently developed ab initio quantum electrodynamical density-functional theory approximation, we specifically investigate the phonon-mediated superconductive behavior of MgB2 under different cavity setups and find that in the strong light-matter coupling regime its superconducting transition temperature can be, in principles, enhanced by ≈73% (≈40%) in an in-plane (out-of-plane) polarized cavity. However, in a realistic cavity, we expect the Tc of MgB2 can increase, at most, by 5 K via photon vacuum fluctuations. The results highlight that strong light-matter coupling in extended systems can profoundly alter material properties in a non-perturbative way by modifying their electronic structure and phononic dispersion at the same time. Our findings indicate a pathway to the experimental realization of light-controlled superconductivity in solid-state materials at equilibrium via cavity-material engineering.

Correlated materials may exhibit unusually high resistivity increasing linearly in temperature, breaking through the Mott-Ioffe-Regel bound, above which coherent quasiparticles are destroyed. The fate of collective charge excitations, or plasmons, in these systems is a subject of debate. Several studies suggest plasmons are overdamped while others detect unrenormalized plasmons. Here, we present direct optical images of low-loss hyperbolic plasmon polaritons (HPPs) in the correlated van der Waals metal MoOCl2. HPPs are plasmon-photon modes that waveguide through extremely anisotropic media and are remarkably long-lived in MoOCl2. Many-body theory supported by photoemission results reveals that MoOCl2 is in an orbital-selective and highly incoherent Peierls phase. Different orbitals acquire markedly different bonding-antibonding character, producing a highly-anisotropic, isolated Fermi surface. The Fermi surface is further reconstructed and made partly incoherent by electronic interactions, renormalizing the plasma frequency. HPPs remain long-lived in spite of this, allowing us to uncover previously unseen imprints of electronic correlations on plasmonic collective modes.

In strongly correlated materials, interacting electrons are entangled and form collective quantum states, resulting in rich low-temperature phase diagrams. Notable examples include cuprate superconductors, in which superconductivity emerges at low doping out of an unusual

The recent observation of superconductivity in twisted bilayer WSe

For molecules and solids, we developed efficient MPI-parallel algorithms for evaluating the second-order exchange term with bare, statically screened, and dynamically screened interactions. We employ the resulting term in a fully self-consistent manner together with scGW, resulting in the following vertex-corrected scGW schemes: scGWSOX, scGWSOSEX, scGW2SOSEX, and scG3W2theories. We show that for the vertex evaluation, the reduction of scaling by tensor hypercontraction (THC) has two limiting execution regimes. We used the resulting code to perform the largest (by the number of orbitals) fully self-consistent calculations with the SOX term. We demonstrate that our procedure allows for a reliable evaluation of even small energy differences. Utilizing a broken-symmetry approach, we explore the influence of the SOX term on the effective magnetic exchange couplings. We show that the treatment of SOX has a significant impact on the obtained values of the effective exchange constants, which we explain through a self-energy dependence on an effective dielectric constant. We confirm this explanation by analyzing natural orbitals and local changes in charge transfer quantifying superexchange. Our analysis explains the structure of weak electron correlation responsible for the modulation of superexchange in both molecules and solids. Finally, for solids, we evaluate Neel temperatures utilizing the high-temperature expansion and compare the results obtained with experimental measurements.

We study the formation of ferromagnetic and magnetic polaron states in weakly doped heterobilayer transition metal dichalcogenides in the

The recent observation of superconductivity in the vicinity of insulating or Fermi surface reconstructed metallic states has established twisted bilayers of WSe

Magic angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG) presents a fascinating platform for investigating the effects of electron interactions in topological flat bands. The Bistritzer-MacDonald (BM) model provides a simplified quantitative description of the flat bands. Introducing long-range Coulomb interactions leads to an interacting BM (IBM) Hamiltonian, a momentum-space continuum description which offers a very natural starting point for many-body studies of MATBG. Accurate and reliable many-body computations in the IBM model are challenging, however, and have been limited mostly to special fillings, or smaller lattice sizes. We employ state-of-the-art auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) method to study the IBM model, which constrains the sign problem to enable accurate treatment of large system sizes. We determine ground-state properties and quantify errors compared to mean-field theory calculations. Our calculations identify correlated metal states and their competition with the insulating Kramers inter-valley coherent state at both half-filling and charge neutrality. Additionally, we investigate one- and three-quarter fillings, and examine the effect of many-body corrections beyond single Slater determinant solutions. We discuss the effect that details of the IBM Hamiltonian have on the results, including different forms of double-counting corrections, and the need to establish and precisely specify many-body Hamiltonians to allow more direct and quantitative comparisons with experiments in MATBG.

We show how to use diagrammatic techniques to compute the weak-coupling perturbation series of the self-consistent solution to a Dynamical Mean Field Theory (DMFT) problem. This approach constitutes an alternative to using diagrammatic techniques directly as an impurity solver. It allows one to bypass the need of multiple perturbative series resummations within the DMFT self-consistency loop. It can be applied at or out of equilibrium, with any diagrammatic formalism, such as real times, imaginary times, or Matsubara frequencies formalisms. As a proof of principle, we illustrate our method with the half-filled Hubbard model on the Bethe lattice in the DMFT approximation, using Quantum Quasi-Monte Carlo (QQMC) to obtain the impurity perturbation series on the real time axis.