Reexamining doped two-legged Hubbard ladders

TL;DR

This study uses advanced DMRG techniques to accurately analyze the ground state of doped two-legged Hubbard ladders, confirming the Luther-Emery liquid phase at low doping and revealing a transition to charge order at higher doping levels.

Contribution

It provides the most precise DMRG-based determination of correlation exponents and clarifies the phase behavior of the Hubbard ladder across various doping levels.

Findings

Confirmed Luther-Emery liquid phase with $K_{sc} imes K_ ho = 1$ at low doping.

Identified transition to charge order and closing of the spin gap at high doping.

Developed a standard method for analyzing correlation functions with open boundary conditions.

Abstract

We revisit the ground state of the Hubbard model on 2-legged ladders in this work. We perform DMRG calculation on large system sizes with large kept states and perform extrapolation of DMRG results with truncation errors in the converged region. We find the superconducting correlation exponent $K_{sc}$ extracted from the pair-pair correlation is very sensitive to the position of the reference bond, reflecting a huge boundary effect on it. By systematically removing the effects from boundary conditions, finite sizes, and truncation errors in DMRG, we obtain the most accurate value of $K_{sc}$ and $K_\rho$ so far with DMRG. With these exponents, we confirm that the 2-legged Hubbard model is in the Luther-Emery liquid phase with $K_{sc} \cdot K_\rho = 1$ from tiny doping near half-filling to $1/8$ hole doping. When the doping is increased to $\delta \gtrapprox 1/6$, the behaviors of charge, pairing, and spin correlations don't change qualitatively, but the relationship $K_{sc} \cdot K_\rho = 1$ is likely to be violated. With the further increase of the doping to $\delta = 1/3$, the quasi long-ranged charge correlation turns to a true long-ranged charge order and the spin gap is closed, while the pair-pair correlation still decays algebraically. Our work provides a standard way to analyze the correlation functions when studying systems with open boundary conditions.