English

Solvable model for a charge-$4e$ superconductor

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2022-10-05 v3 Superconductivity High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

A charge-4e4e superconductor forms due to the condensation of quartets of electrons. While in previous works the mechanism for the formation of charge-4e4e superconductivity has been analyzed in terms of the binding of Cooper pairs in unconventional superconductors, its properties in the fermionic sector have not been studied systematically due to its inherently interacting nature even at the mean-field level. Here we propose a solvable model for a charge-4e4e superconductor -- a spinful version of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model with an anomalous quartic term. We show that the ground state is gapless and resembles a heavy Fermi liquid. We analytically solve for the superfluid density and show that it is perturbative in the strength of the charge-4e4e order parameter, in sharp contrast with a regular (charge-2e2e) superconductor. Upon lowering temperature, we show that the correlation between charge-4e4e order and regular interaction terms can drive a first-order phase transition to a charge-2e2e superconducting state.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.09906,
  title  = {Solvable model for a charge-$4e$ superconductor},
  author = {Nikolay V. Gnezdilov and Yuxuan Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.09906},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

24 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:44:02.996Z