Variational Monte Carlo study on the bilayer model for
Phys. Rev. B 113, 174521 – Published 18 May, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/x95b-9hnm
Abstract
The discovery of high-temperature superconductivity (HTSC) in has aroused significant interest in exploring the pairing mechanism. Previous studies have proposed an effective -orbital bilayer model, in which the electrons of the orbital are charge carriers, which are subject to the intralayer antiferromagnetic (AFM) superexchange and the large interlayer AFM superexchange typically stronger than , with transferred from the nearly half filled, and hence localized, orbital through the strong Hund's rule coupling. Here we study this model by the variational Monte Carlo (VMC) simulation and find a dominant interlayer -wave pairing, in which the SC order parameters have a drastic improvement compared with those of the mean-field (MF)-type theories. In real materials, the Hund's coupling is finite, leading to reduced , dictating that the MF-type theories have difficulty explaining the HTSC. However, our VMC calculations find that even for effective as weak as , the interlayer pairing is still considerably large and can be compared with the observed in experiments, which is very weak in MF-type theories. This result indicates the important role of the Gutzwiller projection in improving the , which is ignored in the MF-type theories. In addition, our results show that suppressed interlayer hopping can promote interlayer pairing, which is consistent with the fact that the interlayer hopping of the orbital in is very weak. Our research offers a perspective for understanding the pairing mechanism of bilayer nickelates and provides a reference for recent ultracold-atom experiments in mixed-dimensional systems.