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QUANTUM SIMULATION

Pairing with strings attached

Nature Physics volume 18, pages 621–622 (2022)Cite this article

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Charge carriers in an engineered bilayer Mott insulator are predicted to form tightly bound, mobile pairs, glued together by string excitations of the antiferromagnetic order — a scenario that can be tested with quantum gas microscopy experiments.

Many unconventional superconductors, like the cuprates or bilayer graphene, materialize close to Mott insulating phases. In a Mott insulator each lattice site is, on average, occupied by a single electron, and the motion of electrons is inhibited by a strong on-site Coulomb repulsion. When electrons are removed from the material, the resulting holes are both mobile and charged so that the material becomes conducting. However, these holes are also strongly correlated resulting in a metal that can develop unconventional superconductivity. Although it is important for the quest for room-temperature superconductivity, a complete understanding of the underlying pairing mechanism is still lacking. Now, writing in Nature Physics, Annabelle Bohrdt and collaborators propose a setup of a bilayer Mott insulator where pairing of holes is expected to occur in a regime that is accessible with state-of-the-art quantum gas microscopy experiments1.

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Fig. 1: Pairing in bilayer Mott insulators.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Physics Institute & Kirchhoff-Institute for Physics, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany

    Martin Gärttner

  2. Institute of Theoretical Solid State Physics & Institute of Quantum Materials and Technology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Markus Garst

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  1. Martin Gärttner
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  2. Markus Garst
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Correspondence to Martin Gärttner.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Gärttner, M., Garst, M. Pairing with strings attached. Nat. Phys. 18, 621–622 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01592-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01592-1

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