Recent experiments on twisted bilayer graphene have shown a high-temperature parent state with massless Dirac fermions and broken electronic flavor symmetry; superconductivity and correlated insulators emerge from this parent state at lower temperatures. We propose that the superconducting and correlated insulating orders are connected by Wess–Zumino–Witten terms, so that defects of one order contain quanta of another order and skyrmion fluctuations of the correlated insulator are a “mechanism” for superconductivity. We present a comprehensive listing of plausible low-temperature orders and the parent flavor symmetry-breaking orders. The previously characterized topological nature of the band structure of twisted bilayer graphene plays an important role in this analysis.
Magic-angle twisted trilayer graphene (TTG) has recently emerged as a platform to engineer strongly correlated flat bands. We reveal the normal-state structural and electronic properties of TTG using low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy at twist angles for which superconductivity has been observed. Real trilayer samples undergo a strong reconstruction of the moiré lattice, which locks layers into near–magic-angle, mirror symmetric domains comparable in size with the superconducting coherence length. This relaxation introduces an array of localized twist-angle faults, termed twistons and moiré solitons, whose electronic structure deviates strongly from the background regions, leading to a doping-dependent, spatially granular electronic landscape. The Fermi-level density of states is maximally uniform at dopings for which superconductivity has been observed in transport measurements.
We study quantum SU(M ) spins with all-to-all and random Heisenberg exchange interactions of rootmean-square strength J. The M → ∞ model has a spin liquid ground state with the spinons obeying the equations of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model. Numerical studies of the SU(2) model with S = 1/2 spins show spin glass order in the ground state, but also display SYK spin liquid behavior in the intermediate frequency spin spectrum. We employ a 1/M expansion to describe the crossover from fractionalized fermionic spinons to a confining spin glass state with weak spin glass order q EA . The SYK spin liquid behavior persists down to a frequency ω * ∼ Jq EA , and for ω < ω * , the spectral density is linear in ω, thus quenching the extensive zero temperature entropy of the spin liquid. The linear ω spectrum is qualitatively similar to that obtained earlier using bosonic spinons for large q EA . We argue that the extensive SYK spin liquid entropy is transformed as T → 0 to an extensive complexity of the spin glass state.
We describe the confining instabilities of a proposed quantum spin liquid underlying the pseudogap metal state of the hole-doped cuprates. The spin liquid can be described by a SU(2) gauge theory of N f = 2 massless Dirac fermions carrying fundamental gauge charges—this is the low-energy theory of a mean-field state of fermionic spinons moving on the square lattice with π -flux per plaquette in the ℤ 2 center of SU(2). This theory has an emergent SO(5) f global symmetry and is presumed to confine at low energies to the Néel state. At nonzero doping (or smaller Hubbard repulsion U at half-filling), we argue that confinement occurs via the Higgs condensation of bosonic chargons carrying fundamental SU(2) gauge charges also moving in π ℤ 2 -flux. At half-filling, the low-energy theory of the Higgs sector has N b = 2 relativistic bosons with a possible emergent SO(5) b global symmetry describing rotations between a d -wave superconductor, period-2 charge stripes, and the time-reversal breaking “ d -density wave” state. We propose a conformal SU(2) gauge theory with N f = 2 fundamental fermions, N b = 2 fundamental bosons, and a SO(5) f ×SO(5) b global symmetry, which describes a deconfined quantum critical point between a confining state which breaks SO(5) f and a confining state which breaks SO(5) b . The pattern of symmetry breaking within both SO(5)s is determined by terms likely irrelevant at the critical point, which can be chosen to obtain a transition between Néel order and d -wave superconductivity. A similar theory applies at nonzero doping and large U , with longer-range couplings of the chargons leading to charge order with longer periods.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.