Signature of preformed pairs in angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy

TL;DR

This study uses advanced computational methods to distinguish between polaronic and bipolaronic liquids in the Hubbard-Holstein model, suggesting angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy can identify pre-formed pairs in correlated materials.

Contribution

It introduces a novel wavefunction model for incoherent bipolarons and demonstrates how spectral features reveal pre-formed pairs in low-dimensional systems.

Findings

Spectral weight shows a gap for bipolarons, indicating pairing.

Polaronic liquids display spectral weight up to the Fermi energy.

A 'Bose sea' model effectively describes incoherent bipolarons.

Abstract

We use density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) and variational exact diagonalization (VED) to calculate the single-electron removal spectral weight for the Hubbard-Holstein model at low electron densities. Tuning the strength of the electron-phonon coupling and of the Hubbard repulsion allows us to contrast the results for a liquid of polarons versus a liquid of bipolarons. The former shows spectral weight up to the Fermi energy, as expected for a metal. The latter has a gap in its spectral weight, set by the bipolaron binding energy, although this is also a (strongly correlated) metal. This difference suggests that angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy could be used to identify liquids of pre-formed pairs. Furthermore, we show that the one-dimensional liquid of incoherent bipolarons is well approximated by a "Bose sea" of bosons that are hard-core in momentum space, occupying the momenta inside the Fermi sea but otherwise non-interacting. This new proposal for a strongly-correlated many-body wavefunction opens the way for studying various other properties of incoherent (non-superconducting) liquids of pre-formed pairs in any dimension.