A microscopic basis is provided for the spin-fermion model used to describe the physics of the underdoped cuprates. In this way, a spin-fermion coupling is shown to take care of the local no double occupancy constraint, which is ignored in the weakly coupled regime. This ingredient is proved to be essential to capture the physics of strong correlations, however. We elaborate further on our recent proposal for the strong-coupling version of the spin-fermion model that may prove to be the correct starting point to deal with the strong correlation physics displayed by the underdoped cuprates.
We study a system of doped antiferromagnet in three dimensions at finite temperatures using the t-J model, a canonical model of strongly correlated electrons. We employ the slave-fermion representation of electrons, in which an electron is described as a composite of a charged spinless holon and a chargeless spinon. We introduce two kinds of U(1) gauge fields on links as auxiliary fields, one describing resonating valence bonds of antiferromagnetic nearest-neighbor spin pairs and the other for nearest-neighbor hopping amplitudes of holons and spinons in the ferromagnetic channel. To perform a numerical study of the system, we integrate out the fermionic holon field by using the hopping expansion in powers of the hopping amplitude, which is legitimate for the region in and near the insulating phase. The resultant effective model is described in terms of bosonic spinons, two U(1) gauge fields, and a collective field for hole pairs. We study this model by means of Monte Carlo simulations, calculating the specific heat, spin correlation functions, and instanton densities. We obtain a phase diagram in the hole concentration-temperature plane, which is in good agreement with that observed recently for clean and homogeneous underdoped samples.
The effect of spin-fluctuation scattering processes on the region of the superconducting phase in the strongly correlated electrons (Hubbard fermions) has been investigated by the diagram technique for Hubbard operators. It is shown that spin fluctuations in the one-loop approximation for the − t' − t − J*- model taking into account long-range hoppings and three-center interactions are reflected by components of the strength operator. In this approximation for the d-type symmetry of the order parameter for the superconducting phase a system of infinite integral equations has been derived. Obtained dependencies of critical temperature on the electron concentrations show that joint effect of long-range hoppings, three-center interactions, and dynamical spin-fluctuation processes leads to strong renormalization of the superconducting phase region. It was shown that these processes essentially modify distribution functions of Hubbard fermions in normal phase.