Abstract
We show that the nature of quantum phases around the superconductor-insulator transition (SIT) is controlled by charge-vortex topological interactions, and does not depend on the details of material parameters and disorder. We find three distinct phases, superconductor, superinsulator, and bosonic topological insulator. The superinsulator is a state of matter with infinite resistance in a finite temperature range, which is the S-dual of the superconductor and in which charge transport is prevented by electric strings binding charges of opposite sign. The electric strings ensuring linear confinement of charges are generated by instantons and are dual to superconducting Abrikosov vortices. Material parameters and disorder enter the London penetration depth of the superconductor, the string tension of the superinsulator and the quantum fluctuation parameter driving the transition between them. They are entirely encoded in four phenomenological parameters of a topological gauge theory of the SIT. Finally, we point out that, in the context of strong coupling gauge theories, the many-body localization phenomenon that is often referred to as an underlying mechanism for superinsulation is a mere transcription of the well-known phenomenon of confinement into solid-state physics language and is entirely driven by endogenous disorder embodied by instantons with no need of exogenous disorder.
Highlights
The superconductor-insulator transition (SIT) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] is a paradigmatic quantum phase transition found in Josephson junction arrays (JJA) [1, 6] and in 2D disordered superconducting films at low temperatures T [2,3,4,5]
In 1978, ’t Hooft [8] appealed to a solid-state physics analogy in a Gedankenexperiment to explain quark confinement and demonstrated that this is realized in a phase which is in many respects similar to the superconducting phase, but is in a sense a zero particle mobility phase, the extreme opposite of a superconductor and called this phase a “superinsulator.” In 1996, two of the present authors [9] developed a comprehensive field theory framework for the description of the SIT in JJA
It was shown that in duality to the Meissner effect in superconductors, which constricts the magnetic field lines penetrating a type II superconductor into Abrikosov vortices, in superinsulators, electric flux tubes that linearly bind Cooper pairs into neutral “mesons” form
Summary
The superconductor-insulator transition (SIT) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] is a paradigmatic quantum phase transition found in Josephson junction arrays (JJA) [1, 6] and in 2D disordered superconducting films at low temperatures T [2,3,4,5]. Keywords Quantum phase transition · Superinsulator · Gauge field A local formulation of such topological interactions requires the introduction of two emergent gauge fields aμ and bμ coupled to the conserved charge and vortex currents, respectively.
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