Magnetic instability and pair binding in aromatic hydrocarbon superconductors

Understanding magnetism and electron correlation in many unconventional superconductors is essential to explore mechanism of superconductivity. In this work, we perform a systematic numerical study of the magnetic and pair binding properties in recently discovered polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) superconductors including alkali-metal-doped picene, coronene, phenanthrene, and dibenzopentacene. The π-electrons on the carbon atoms of a single molecule are modelled by the one-orbital Hubbard model, and the energy difference [Image: see text] between carbon atoms with and without hydrogen bonds is taking into account. We demonstrate that the spin polarized ground state is realized for charged molecules in the physical parameter regions, which provides a reasonable explanation of local spins observed in PAHs. In alkali-metal-doped dibenzopentacene, our results show that electron correlation may produce an effective attraction between electrons for the charged molecule with one or three added electrons.