Abstract
Superconductivity has recently been discovered in several families of iron-based compounds, but despite intense research even such basic electronic properties of these materials as Fermi surfaces, effective electron masses and orbital characters are still subject to debate. Here, we address an issue that has not been considered before, namely the consequences of dynamical screening of the Coulomb interactions between Fe d electrons. We demonstrate that dynamical screening effects are important not only for higher-energy spectral features, such as correlation satellites seen in photoemission spectroscopy, but also for the low-energy electronic structure. Our analysis indicates that BaFe2As2 is a strongly correlated compound with strongly doping- and temperature-dependent properties. In the hole-overdoped regime an incoherent metal is found, whereas Fermi-liquid behaviour is recovered in the undoped compound. At optimal doping, the self-energy exhibits an unusual square-root energy dependence, which leads to strong band renormalizations near the Fermi level.
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Acknowledgements
We thank M. Aichhorn, H. Aoki, R. Arita, V. Brouet, H. Ding, T. Qian and L. Vaugier for discussions. The DMFT calculations were run on the Brutus cluster at ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule) Zurich using a code based on ALPS (ref. 46). We thank E. Gull for providing the code for the DMFT-self-consistency loop. This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant PP0022-118866), the G-COE program of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT; G-03), the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche under project CORRELMAT, Institut du Développement et des Ressources en Informatique Scientifique/Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif Orsay under project 20111393 and the US National Science Foundation under grant DMR-1006282. We also acknowledge the hospitality of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics Santa Barbara, where this work was initiated.
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S.B. proposed the specific materials project, T.M. provided the LDA Hamiltonian and frequency-dependent interaction, P.W. carried out the DMFT calculations and M.C. did the data analysis (analytical continuation) and produced the figures. P.W. and S.B. wrote the manuscript, with help from the other authors. All authors participated in the planning of the study and the interpretation of the data.
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Werner, P., Casula, M., Miyake, T. et al. Satellites and large doping and temperature dependence of electronic properties in hole-doped BaFe2As2. Nature Phys 8, 331–337 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2250
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2250
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