Coexistence of nematic order and superconductivity in the Hubbard model

We study the interplay of nematic and superconducting order in the two-dimensional Hubbard model and show that they can coexist, especially when superconductivity is not the energetically dominant phase. Due to a breaking of the C4 symmetry, the coexisting phase inherently contains admixture of the s-wave pairing components. As a result, the superconducting gap exhibits nonstandard features including changed nodal directions. Our results also show that in the optimally doped regime the pure superconducting phase is typically unstable towards developing nematicity (breaking of the C4 symmetry). This has implications for the cuprate high-Tc superconductors, for which in this regime the so-called intertwined orders have recently been observed. Namely, the coexisting phase may be viewed as a precursor to such more involved patterns of symmetry breaking.