Attractive Kane-Mele-Hubbard model at half filling: phase diagram and Cooperon condensation

TL;DR

This paper investigates the phase diagram of the attractive Kane-Mele-Hubbard model on a honeycomb lattice at half filling, emphasizing the role of next-nearest-neighbor hopping and analyzing superconducting instabilities with advanced many-body techniques.

Contribution

The study introduces the phase diagram of the attractive KMH model including NNN hopping and compares the Bethe-Salpeter formalism with the T-matrix approximation for collective mode analysis.

Findings

NNN hopping significantly alters the topological phase diagram.

Small (4%) difference in sound velocity between BS and T-matrix methods.

Bubble-diagram contributions are negligible near the phase transition.

Abstract

Recently, the attractive Kane-Mele-Habbard (KMH) model on a honeycomb lattice at half filling has been studied in two papers: PRB 99, 184514 (2019) and PRB 94, 104508 (2016). The authors of the first one presented the phase diagram which interpolates the trivial and non-trivial topological states. However, the next-nearest-neighbor (NNN) hopping term has been neglected, although it is several orders of magnitude stronger than the internal spin-orbit coupling. We use the mean-field approximation to derive the phase diagram of the attractive KMH model with NNN hoping at half filling. The phase diagram without and the phase diagram with NNN hopping are significantly different in the non-trivial topological region. The possibility to have superconducting instability in the attractive KMH model has been analyzed in the second paper within the T-matrix approximation. The question that naturally arises here is about the contributions due to the bubble diagrams, which are included in the Bethe-Salpeter (BS) equation, but neglected by the T-matrix approximation. To answer this question, we apply the BS formalism to calculate the slope of the Goldstone mode and the corresponding sound velocity. We found 4% difference between the values of the sound velocity provided by the T-matrix approximation and the BS equation. This small difference confirm previously reported result that close to the phase transition boundary the bubble-diagram contributions are not important.