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An electronic solid with itinerant carriers and localized magnetic moments represents a paradigmatic strongly correlated system. The electrical transport properties associated with the itinerant carriers, as they scatter off these local moments, have been scrutinized across a number of materials. Here, we analyze the transport characteristics associated with ultraclean PdCrO${}_2$—a quasi-two-dimensional material consisting of alternating layers of itinerant Pd-electrons and Mott-insulating CrO${}_2$layers—which shows a pronounced regime ofT-linear resistivity over a wide range of intermediate temperatures. By contrasting these observations to the transport properties in a closely related material PdCoO${}_2$, where the CoO${}_2$layers are band-insulators, we can rule out the traditional electron–phonon interactions as being responsible for this interesting regime. We propose a previously ignored electron-magneto-elastic interaction between the Pd-electrons, the Cr local moments and an out-of-plane phonon as the main scattering mechanism that leads to the significant enhancement of resistivity and aT-linear regime in PdCrO${}_2$at temperatures far in excess of the magnetic ordering temperature. We suggest a number of future experiments to confirm this picture in PdCrO${}_2$as well as other layered metallic/Mott-insulating materials.

 

Abstract What limits the value of the superconducting transition temperature ( T c ) is a question of great fundamental and practical importance. Various heuristic upper bounds on T c have been proposed, expressed as fractions of the Fermi temperature, T F , the zero-temperature superfluid stiffness, ρ s (0), or a characteristic Debye frequency, ω 0 . We show that while these bounds are physically motivated and are certainly useful in many relevant situations, none of them serve as a fundamental bound on T c . To demonstrate this, we provide explicit models where T c / T F (with an appropriately defined T F ), T c / ρ s (0), and T c / ω 0 are unbounded. 

Magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG) exhibits a panoply of many-body phenomena that are intimately tied to the appearance of narrow and well-isolated electronic bands. The microscopic ingredients that are responsible for the complex experimental phenomenology include electron–electron (phonon) interactions and nontrivial Bloch wavefunctions associated with the narrow bands. Inspired by recent experiments, we focus on two independent quantities that are considerably modified by Coulomb interaction-driven band renormalization, namely the density of states and the minimal spatial extent associated with the Wannier functions. First, we show that a filling-dependent enhancement of the density of states, caused by band flattening, in combination with phonon-mediated attraction due to electron-phonon umklapp processes, increases the tendency towards superconducting pairing in a range of angles around magic-angle. Second, we demonstrate that the minimal spatial extent associated with the Wannier functions, which contributes towards increasing the superconducting phase stiffness, also develops a nontrivial enhancement due to the interaction-induced renormalization of the Bloch wavefunctions. While our modeling of superconductivity (SC) assumes a weak electron-phonon coupling and does not consider many of the likely relevant correlation effects, it explains simply the experimentally observed robustness of SC in the wide range of angles that occurs in the relevant range of fillings.

 

Transition metal dichalcogenide heterostructures show strong interactions and can imprint a moiré potential to a separate layer.