Variational Monte Carlo Study on the Superconductivity in the Two-Dimensional Hubbard Model

The possibility of superconductivity (SC) in the 2D Hubbard model (2DH) was investigated by means of the variational Monte Carlo method. The energy gain of the d-wave SC state, obtained as the difference of the minimum energy with a finite gap and that with zero gap, was examined with respect to dependences on U, electron density rho and next nearest neighbor transfer t' mainly on the 10 x 10 lattice. It was found to be maximized around U = 8 (in energy unit of t). It sharply increased for negative values of t' and had a broad peak for t' ~ -0.10. For these values of t' the energy gain was a smooth increasing function of rho almost independent of the shell structure in the region starting from ~ 0.76 up to 0.92. This clearly indicates that the result is already close to the value in the bulk limit. For t' = 0, the energy gain depended on the electronic shell state. Competition between the SC and the SDW states was also investigated. When t' = 0, the ground state is SDW in the range of rho \geq ~ 0.84$. The SC region slightly extends up to ~ 0.87 for t' ~ -0.10. Consequently the present results strongly indicate that the 2DH with t' ~ -0.1 drives SC by itself in the rho region from ~ 0.76 to ~ 0.87. The energy gain in the SC state with suitable parameters is found to be in reasonable agreement with the condensation energy in the SC state of YBa2Cu3O7. The corresponding t-J model proves to give an order-of-magnitude larger energy gain, which questions its validity.