Exotic paired phases in ladders with spin-dependent hopping

TL;DR

This paper investigates a novel exotic phase called Cooper-pair Bose-metal in a 2D fermionic system with spin-dependent hopping, using DMRG on a ladder, revealing a new non-Fermi liquid state with potential experimental realization.

Contribution

The study provides the first evidence of a Cooper-pair Bose-metal phase in a ladder geometry with spin-dependent hopping, expanding understanding of unconventional paired states.

Findings

Evidence for a Cooper-pair Bose-metal phase at intermediate coupling.

Identification of a d-wave paired superfluid phase.

Phase diagram mapping as a function of anisotropy, density, and interaction.

Abstract

Fermions in two-dimensions (2D) when subject to anisotropic spin-dependent hopping can potentially give rise to unusual paired states in {\it unpolarized} mixtures that can behave as non-Fermi liquids. One possibility is a fully paired state with a gap for fermion excitations in which the Cooper pairs remain uncondensed. Such a "Cooper-pair Bose-metal" phase would be expected to have a singular Bose-surface in momentum space. As demonstrated in the context of 2D bosons hopping with a frustrating ring-exchange interaction, an analogous Bose-metal phase has a set of quasi-1D descendent states when put on a ladder geometry. Here we present a density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) study of the attractive Hubbard model with spin-dependent hopping on a two-leg ladder geometry. In our setup, one spin species moves preferentially along the leg direction, while the other does so along the rung direction. We find compelling evidence for the existence of a novel Cooper-pair Bose-metal phase in a region of the phase diagram at intermediate coupling. We further explore the phase diagram of this model as a function of hopping anisotropy, density, and interaction strength, finding a conventional superfluid phase, as well as a phase of paired Cooper pairs with d-wave symmetry, similar to the one found in models of hard-core bosons with ring-exchange. We argue that simulating this model with cold Fermi gases on spin dependent optical lattices is a promising direction for realizing exotic quantum states.