Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition and BCS-Bose crossover in the two-dimensional attractive Hubbard model

We study the two-dimensional attractive Hubbard model using the mapping onto the half-filled repulsive Hubbard model in a uniform magnetic field coupled to the fermion spins. The low-energy effective action for charge and pairing fluctuations is obtained in the hydrodynamic regime. We recover the action of a Bose superfluid where half the fermion density is identified as the conjugate variable of the phase of the superconducting order parameter. By integrating out charge fluctuations, we obtain a phase-only action. In the zero-temperature superconducting state, this action describes a collective phase mode smoothly evolving from the Anderson-Bogoliubov mode at weak coupling to the Bogoliubov mode of a Bose superfluid at strong coupling. At finite temperature, the phase-only action can be used to extract an effective XY model and thus obtain the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) phase transition temperature. We also identify a renormalized classical regime of superconducting fluctuations above the BKT phase transition, and a regime of incoherent pairs at higher temperature. Special care is devoted to the nearly half-filled case where the symmetry of the order parameter is enlarged to SO(3) due to strong q=(pi,pi) charge fluctuations. The low-energy effective action is then an SO(3) nonlinear sigma model with a (symmetry breaking) magnetic field proportional to the doping. In the strong-coupling limit, the attractive Hubbard model can be mapped onto the Heisenberg model in a magnetic field, which reduces to the quantum XY model (except for a weak magnetic field, i.e., in the low-density limit of the attractive model). In the low-density limit, the Heisenberg model allows one to recover the action of a Bose superfluid, including the (delrho)(2) term (with rho the density), and in turn the Gross-Pitaevskii equation.