Extended $s$-wave pairing from an emergent Feshbach resonance in bilayer nickelate superconductors

Abstract

Since the discovery of unconventional superconductivity in cuprates, unraveling the pairing mechanism of charge carriers in doped antiferromagnets has been a long-standing challenge. Motivated by the discovery of high-T$_c$ superconductivity in nickelate bilayer La$_3$Ni$_2$O$_7$ (LNO), we study a minimal mixed dimensional (MixD) $t-J$ model supplemented with a repulsive Coulomb interaction $V$. When hole-doped, previous numerical simulations revealed that the system exhibits strong binding energies, with a phenomenology resembling a BCS-to-BEC crossover accompanied by a Feshbach resonance between two distinct types of charge carriers. Here, we perform a mean-field analysis that enables a direct observation of the BCS-to-BEC crossover as well as microscopic insights into the crossover region and the pairing symmetry for two-dimensional bilayers. We benchmark our mean-field description by comparing it to density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) simulations in quasi-one dimensional settings and find remarkably good agreement. For the two-dimensional system relevant to LNO our mean-field calculations predict a BCS pairing gap with an extended $s$-wave symmetry, directly resulting from the pairing mechanism's Feshbach-origin. Our analysis hence gives insights into pairing in unconventional superconductors and, further, can be tested in currently available ultracold atom experiments.