Intriguing analogies between the nickelates and the cuprates provide a promising avenue for unraveling the microscopic mechanisms underlying high-Tc superconductivity. While electron correlation effects in the nickelates have been extensively studied, the role of electron-phonon coupling (EPC) remains highly controversial. Here, by taking pristine LaNiO2 as an exemplar nickelate, we present an in-depth study of EPC for both the non-magnetic (NM) and the C-type antiferromagnetic (C-AFM) phase using advanced density functional theory methods without invoking U or other free parameters. The weak EPC strength λ in the NM phase is found to be greatly enhanced (∼4×) due to the presence of magnetism in the C-AFM phase. This enhancement arises from strong interactions between the flat bands associated with the Ni-3dz2 orbitals and the low-frequency phonon modes driven by the vibrations of Ni and La atoms. The resulting phonon softening is shown to yield a distinctive kink in the electronic structure around 15 meV, which would provide an experimentally testable signature of our predictions. Our study highlights the critical role of local magnetic moments and interply EPC in the nickelate.
@article{arxiv.2504.13025,
title = {Magnetism-Enhanced Strong Electron-Phonon Coupling in Infinite-Layer Nickelate},
author = {Ruiqi Zhang and Yanyong Wang and Manuel Engel and Christopher Lane and Henrique Miranda and Lin Hou and Sugata Chowdhury and Bahadur Singh and Bernardo Barbiellini and Jian-Xin Zhu and Robert S. Markiewicz and E. K. U. Gross and Georg Kresse and Arun Bansil and Jianwei Sun},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.13025},
year = {2026}
}