Collective Charge-\(2e\) Bosonic Excitations in Charge-Ordered Systems

RESUMO

Charge order is conventionally characterized by a static modulation of the electronic density, while its collective excitations remain less developed from a quasiparticle perspective than those of spin-ordered systems. Here, we formulate the collective excititations of charge order within an effective charge-pseudospin model, in which the charge-ordered ground state is represented by staggered pseudospin order. Quantizing fluctuations around this ordered state via a Holstein--Primakoff transformation, we reveal two branches of bosonic quasiparticles with degenerate, gapped dispersions that carry opposite quantized electric charges $\pm 2e$. We therefore term these charge-$2e$ bosons ``\textit{bichargons},'' closely paralleling the two magnon branches of a bipartite antiferromagnet that carry opposite spin angular momenta. We show that a temperature gradient drives the diffusion of thermally excited bichargons, generating a charge Seebeck response when the degeneracy between the oppositely charged branches is lifted by tuning the chemical potential away from the charge-neutrality point. In contrast, despite carrying finite electric charges, a thermal bichargon gas remains electrically insulating under a static electric field because bichargon quasiparticle number is not conserved. An ac electric field, however, can parametrically generate coherent pairs of oppositely charged bichargons that support a finite dc drift current in the presence of a bias electric field, offering a bosonic analogue of photoconductivity mediated by photoexcited electron--hole pairs in semiconductors. Our results establish bichargons as a new class of collective bosonic charge carriers in charge-ordered systems and extend the quasiparticle paradigm of magnons in spin-ordered systems to the charge sector, with electric charge replacing spin angular momentum as the transported quantity.