Cooper approach to pair formation in a tight-binding model of La-based cuprate superconductors

TL;DR

This paper investigates pair formation mechanisms in La-based cuprate superconductors using a numerical Cooper approach, revealing how interactions and Fermi surface structure influence superconducting properties and pairing symmetries.

Contribution

It introduces an efficient numerical method for large lattices and analyzes the effects of various interactions on pairing, including d-wave and Coulomb repulsion, in a realistic band structure.

Findings

Attractive interactions of about half an eV match experimental Tc trends.

Ground states show d-wave symmetry driven by Fermi surface structure.

Coulomb repulsion can create pairs at excited energies, including negative effective mass regions.

Abstract

We study numerically, in the framework of the Cooper approach from 1956, mechanisms of pair formation in a model of La-based cuprate superconductors with longer-ranged hopping parameters reported in the literature at different values of center of mass momentum. An efficient numerical method allows to study lattices with more than a million sites. We consider the cases of attractive Hubbard and d-wave type interactions and a repulsive Coulomb interaction. The approach based on a frozen Fermi sea leads to a complex structure of accessible relative momentum states which is very sensitive to the total pair momentum of static or mobile pairs. It is found that interactions with attraction of approximately half of an electronvolt give a satisfactory agreement with experimentally reported results for the critical superconducting temperature and its dependence on hole doping. Ground states exhibit d-wave symmetries for both attractive Hubbard and d-wave interactions which is essentially due to the particular Fermi surface structure and not entirely to an eventual d-wave symmetry of the interaction. We also find pair states created by Coulomb repulsion at excited energies above the Fermi energy and determine the different mechanisms of their formation. In particular, we identify such pairs in a region of negative mass at rather modest excitation energies which is due to a particular band structure.