Electronic structure correspondence of singlet-triplet scale separation in strained Sr2RuO4

TL;DR

This study investigates how uniaxial strain affects the electronic instabilities in Sr2RuO4, revealing that strain enhances singlet tendencies while triplet superconductivity remains suppressed, leading to competing ground states.

Contribution

The paper provides an b initio analysis of strain-induced changes in electronic susceptibilities and instabilities in Sr2RuO4 using advanced GW+DMFT methods.

Findings

Strain increases coherence of all orbitals contributing to Fermiology.

Triplet instability remains suppressed under strain.

Large strain leads to spin density wave instability overtaking superconductivity.

Abstract

At a temperature of roughly 1\,K, \ce{Sr2RuO4} undergoes a transition from a normal Fermi liquid to a superconducting phase. Even while the former is relatively simple and well understood, the superconducting state is not even after 25 years of study. More recently it has been found that critical temperatures can be enhanced by application of uniaxial strain, up to a critical strain, after which it falls off. In this work, we take an `instability' approach and seek for divergences in susceptibilities. This provides an unbiased way to distinguish tendencies to competing ground states. We show that in the unstrained compound the singlet and triplet instabilities of the normal Fermi liquid phase are closely spaced. Under uniaxial strain electrons residing on all orbitals contributing to the Fermiology become more coherent while the electrons of Ru-$d_{xy}$ character become heavier and electrons of Ru-$d_{xz,yz}$ characters become lighter. In the process, Im\,$\chi(\mathbf{q},\omega)$ increases rapidly around the incommensurate vector $\mathbf{q}{=}(0.3,0.3,0)2\pi/a$ while it gets suppressed at all other commensurate vectors, in particular at $q{=}0$, which is essential for spin-triplet superconductivity. Thus the triplet superconducting instability remains the lagging instability of the system and the singlet instability enhances under strain, leading to a large energy-scale separation between these competing instabilities. At large strain an instability to a spin density wave overtakes the superconducting one. The analysis relies on a high-fidelity, \emph{ab initio} description of the one-particle properties and two-particle susceptibilities, based on the Quasiparticle Self-Consistent \emph{GW} approximation augmented by Dynamical Mean Field theory. This approach is described and its high fidelity confirmed by comparing to observed one- and two-particle properties.