Evolution from an acoustic-plasmon-mediated superconductivity to an acoustic-phonon-mediated superconductivity in bilayers

Abstract

Motivated by recent developments in van der Waals heterostructures, we revisit the acoustic plasmon mechanism of superconductivity in bilayer systems composed of a light layer (LL) and heavy layer (HL) by employing Eliashberg theory. The exchange of virtual plasmons in the HL can lead to a retarded in time attractive interaction between electrons of LL that we model through the screened interaction in the bilayer system within the random phase approximation. We explore the evolution from acoustic plasmon mediated superconductivity to phonon mediated superconductivity by studying the evolution of $T_c$ as the HL mass is increased by a few orders of magnitude compared with the electronic mass in LL. The lower HL mass corresponds to the bilayer acoustic plasmon, while the latter regime is closer to the Born-Oppenheimer regime of acoustic phonon mediated strongly retarded pairing. The heavy HL mass limit is known to obey Migdal's theorem by virtue of the small ratio of the two individual layer masses. We study the nonadiabatic effects for the arbitrary mass ratio with no small parameter systematically by using a frequency cut off in the Eliashberg theory, providing $T_c$ as a function of this cut off.