We study competitions between charge uniform and inhomogeneous states in two-dimensional Hubbard models by using a variational Monte Carlo method. At realistic parameters for cuprate superconductors, emergent effective attraction of carriers generated from repulsive Coulomb interaction leads to charge/spin stripe ground states, which severely compete with uniform superconducting excited states in the energy scale of 10 K for the cuprates. Stripe period increases with decreasing hole doping δ, which agrees with the experiments for La-based cuprates at δ = 1/8. For lower δ, we find a phase separation. Implications of the emergent attraction for the cuprates are discussed.

mVMC (many-variable Variational Monte Carlo) is an open-source software based on the variational Monte Carlo method applicable for a wide range of Hamiltonians for interacting fermion systems. In mVMC, we introduce more than ten thousands variational parameters and simultaneously optimize them by using the stochastic reconfiguration (SR) method. In this paper, we explain basics and user interfaces of mVMC. By using mVMC, users can perform the calculation by preparing only one input file of about ten lines for widely studied quantum lattice models, and can also perform it for general Hamiltonians by preparing several additional input files. We show the benchmark results of mVMC for the Hubbard model, the Heisenberg model, and the Kondo-lattice model. These benchmark results demonstrate that mVMC provides ground-state and low-energy-excited-state wave functions for interacting fermion systems with high accuracy.

The conventional tensor-network states employ real-space product states as reference wave functions. Here, we propose a many-variable variational Monte Carlo (mVMC) method combined with tensor networks by taking advantages of both to study fermionic models. The variational wave function is composed of a pair product wave function operated by real space correlation factors and tensor networks. Moreover, we can apply quantum number projections, such as spin, momentum and lattice symmetry projections, to recover the symmetry of the wave function to further improve the accuracy. We benchmark our method for one-and two-dimensional Hubbard models, which show significant improvement over the results obtained individually either by mVMC or by tensor network. We have applied the present method to hole doped Hubbard model on the square lattice, which indicates the stripe charge/spin order coexisting with a weak d-wave superconducting order in the ground state for the doping concentration less than 0.3, where the stripe oscillation period gets longer with increasing hole concentration. The charge homogeneous and highly superconducting state also exists as a metastable excited state for the doping concentration less than 0.25.

We develop a time-dependent variational Monte Carlo (t-VMC) method for quantum dynamics of strongly correlated electrons. The t-VMC method has been recently applied to bosonic systems and quantum spin systems. Here, we propose a time-dependent trial wave function with many variational parameters, which is suitable for nonequilibrium strongly correlated electron systems. As the trial state, we adopt the generalized pair-product wave function with correlation factors and quantum-number projections. This trial wave function has been proven to accurately describe ground states of strongly correlated electron systems. To show the accuracy and efficiency of our trial wave function in nonequilibrium states as well, we present our benchmark results for relaxation dynamics during and after interaction quench protocols of fermionic Hubbard models. We find that our trial wave function well reproduces the exact results for the time evolution of physical quantities such as energy, momentum distribution, spin structure factor, and superconducting correlations. These results show that the t-VMC with our trial wave function offers an efficient and accurate way to study challenging problems of nonequilibrium dynamics in strongly correlated electron systems.

Laser irradiation stabilizes strong-coupling superconductivity without charge inhomogeneities that is inaccessible in equilibrium.