Ashley Cook

Double perovskite heterostructures: magnetism, Chern bands, and Chern insulators.

Experiments demonstrating the controlled growth of oxide heterostructures have raised the prospect of realizing topologically nontrivial states of correlated electrons in low dimensions. Here, we study heterostructures consisting of {111} bilayers of double perovskites separated by inert band insulators. In bulk, these double perovskites have well-defined local moments interacting with itinerant electrons leading to high temperature ferromagnetism. Incorporating spin-orbit coupling in the two-dimensional honeycomb geometry of a {111} bilayer, we find a rich phase diagram with tunable ferromagnetic order, topological Chern bands, and a C=±2 Chern insulator regime. Our results are of broad relevance to oxide materials such as Sr_{2}FeMoO_{6}, Ba_{2}FeReO_{6}, and Sr_{2}CrWO_{6}.

Efficient computation of lattice Green's functions for models with nearest-neighbour hopping

We show that for models with nearest-neighbour (nn) hopping, the lattice Greens functions can be calculated without the need to perform integrals. Our method applies to rectangular, triangular and honeycomb lattices in two dimensions, and to simple, face-centered and body-centered lattices in three dimensions. External magnetic fields can be dealt with trivially. As an example, we show that our method works for any ratio /0 of the magnetic flux through the unit cell, i.e. irrespective of the change in the size of the magnetic unit cell. Other straightforward generalizations are to models with multiple orbitals per site, with any spin-orbit coupling, on-site disorder, and any combinations thereof. The method works equally well in the presence of surfaces. In all cases, accurate values for large distances can be obtained very efficiently and without finite-size effects. The relationship to other computational methods is also analyzed.

Emergent dome of nematic order around a quantum anomalous Hall critical point

We consider a model of spinful fermions on the triangular lattice which exhibits a C=2 Chern insulator (CI) phase with a quantized anomalous Hall effect, sandwiched between two normal insulator (NI) phases. The first NI-CI quantum phase transition is driven by simultaneous mass inversion of a pair of Dirac fermions, with short range interactions being perturbatively irrelevant. The second CI-NI transition is driven by a single quadratic band touching point protected by momentum space topology and C_6 lattice symmetry. A one-loop renormalization group analysis shows that short range interactions lead to a single marginally relevant perturbation at this transition. We obtain the mean field phase diagram of this model incorporating weak repulsive Hubbard interactions, finding an emergent nematic dome around this CI-NI topological phase transition. We discuss the crossovers in the anomalous Hall conductivity at nonzero temperature, and the Landau theory of the quantum and thermal transitions out of the nematic phase. Our results may be relevant to ferromagnetic double perovskite films with spin-orbit coupling which have been proposed to host such a NI-CI transition. Our work provides perhaps the simplest example of an emergent phase near a quantum phase transition.

Theory of metallic double perovskites with spin-orbit coupling and strong correlations: Application to ferrimagnetic Ba2FeReO6

We consider a model of the double perovskite Ba2FeReO6, a room temperature ferrimagnet with correlated and spin-orbit coupled Re t2g electrons moving in the background of Fe moments stabilized by Hunds coupling. We show that for such 3d/5d double perovskites, strong correlations on the 5d-element (Re) are essential in driving a half-metallic ground state. Incorporating both strong spin-orbit coupling and the Hubbard repulsion on Re leads to a band structure consistent with ab initio calculations. Using our model, we find a large spin polarization at the Fermi level, and obtain a semi-quantitative understanding of the saturation magnetization of Ba2FeReO6, as well as X-ray magnetic circular dichroism data indicating a significant orbital magnetization. Based on the orbital populations obtained in our theory, we predict a specific doping dependence to the tetragonal distortion accompanying ferrimagnetic order. Finally, the combination of a net magnetization and spin-orbit interactions is shown to induce Weyl nodes in the band structure, and we predict a significant intrinsic anomalous Hall effect in hole-doped Ba2FeReO6. The uncovered interplay of strong correlations and spin-orbit coupling lends partial support to our previous work, which used a local moment description to capture the spin wave dispersion found in neutron scattering measurements. Our work is of broad interest for understanding metallic 4d-based and 5d-based double perovskites which are of fundamental interest and of possible relevance to spintronic applications.