Quantitative assessment of the universal thermopower in the Hubbard model

Wen O Wang; Jixun K Ding; Edwin W Huang; Brian Moritz; Thomas P Devereaux

doi:10.1038/s41467-023-42772-8

Quantitative assessment of the universal thermopower in the Hubbard model

Nat Commun. 2023 Nov 3;14(1):7064. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-42772-8.

Authors

Wen O Wang^{1

2}, Jixun K Ding^{3

4}, Edwin W Huang^{5

6

7}, Brian Moritz⁴, Thomas P Devereaux^{8

9

10}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA. wenwang.physics@gmail.com.
² Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, 2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA, 94025, USA. wenwang.physics@gmail.com.
³ Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA.
⁴ Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, 2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA, 94025, USA.
⁵ Department of Physics and Institute of Condensed Matter Theory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA.
⁶ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA.
⁷ Stavropoulos Center for Complex Quantum Matter, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA.
⁸ Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, 2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA, 94025, USA. tpd@stanford.edu.
⁹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA. tpd@stanford.edu.
¹⁰ Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA. tpd@stanford.edu.

Abstract

As primarily an electronic observable, the room-temperature thermopower S in cuprates provides possibilities for a quantitative assessment of the Hubbard model. Using determinant quantum Monte Carlo, we demonstrate agreement between Hubbard model calculations and experimentally measured room-temperature S across multiple cuprate families, both qualitatively in terms of the doping dependence and quantitatively in terms of magnitude. We observe an upturn in S with decreasing temperatures, which possesses a slope comparable to that observed experimentally in cuprates. From our calculations, the doping at which S changes sign occurs in close proximity to a vanishing temperature dependence of the chemical potential at fixed density. Our results emphasize the importance of interaction effects in the systematic assessment of the thermopower S in cuprates.