A "negative" route to pair density wave order

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new mechanism for the emergence of pair density wave order in strongly coupled multiband superconductors, supported by large-scale numerical simulations showing robust incommensurate modulated superconducting correlations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel route to stable PDW states via interband pairing with negative superfluid weight, demonstrated through density-matrix-renormalization-group calculations.

Findings

PDW can form naturally in strongly coupled multiband systems.

Power-law superconducting correlations with incommensurate modulations are observed.

Genuine long-range PDW order is confirmed in the 2D limit.

Abstract

Pair density waves (PDW) are novel forms of superconducting states that exhibit periodically modulated pairing. A remaining challenge is to elucidate how intrinsic PDW order can emerge robustly in strongly correlated electrons. Here we propose that PDW is prone to form in strongly coupled multiband superconductors simply with interband Cooper pairing between electrons from oppositely dispersing bands. This scenario is heuristically motivated by the observation that uniform interband pairing in such systems would exhibit negative superfluid weight -- a signature of an instability towards pairing modulation, implying that PDW emerges naturally in the true ground state. Using large-scale density-matrix-renormalization-group calculations with finite-size scaling analysis, we demonstrate this PDW mechanism in a minimal model with strong interband attractions. Our simulations reveal power-law superconducting correlations characterized by incommensurate modulations. The exponent $K_{sc}$ of the power-law PDW correlation decreases systematically with increasing ladder width, confirming a genuine long-range PDW order in the 2D limit. Our study therefore demonstrates a promising route to robust PDW states in multiband systems.