Exact SO(8) symmetry in the weakly-interacting two-leg ladder

We revisit the problem of interacting electrons hopping on a two-leg ladder. A perturbative renormalization-group analysis reveals that at half-filling the model scales onto an exactly soluble Gross-Neveu model for arbitrary finite-ranged interactions, provided they are sufficiently weak. The Gross-Neveu model has an enormous global SO(8) symmetry, manifest in terms of eight real Fermion fields that, however, are highly nonlocal in terms of the electron operators. For generic repulsive interactions, the two-leg ladder exhibits a Mott insulating phase at half-filling with d-wave pairing correlations. Integrability of the Gross-Neveu model is employed to extract the exact energies, degeneracies, and quantum numbers of all the low-energy excited states, which fall into degenerate SO(8) multiplets. One SO(8) vector includes two charged Cooper pair excitations, a neutral s=1 triplet of magnons, and three other neutral s=0 particle-hole excitations. A triality symmetry relates these eight two-particle excitations to two other degenerate octets, which are comprised of single-electron-like excitations. In addition to these 24 degenerate ``particle'' states costing an energy (mass) m to create, there is a 28-dimensional antisymmetric tensor multiplet of ``bound'' states with energy 3m. Doping away from half-filling liberates the Cooper pairs, leading to quasi-long-range d-wave pair field correlations, but maintaining a gap to spin and single-electron excitations. For very low doping levels, integrability allows one to extract exact values for these energy gaps. Enlarging the space of interactions to include attractive interactions reveals that there are four robust phases possible for the weak coupling two-leg ladder. While each of the four phases has a (different) SO(8) symmetry, they are shown to all share a common SO(5) symmetry-the one recently proposed by Zhang as a unifying feature of magnetism and superconductivity in the cuprates.