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arXiv:1601.00655 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Intrinsic translational symmetry breaking in a doped Mott insulator

Zheng Zhu, D. N. Sheng, Zheng-Yu Weng

Published Jul 19, 2018• 18 citations
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Abstract

A central issue of Mott physics, with symmetries being fully retained in the spin background, concerns the charge excitation. In a two-leg spin ladder with a spin gap, an injected hole can exhibit either a Bloch wave or a density wave by tuning the ladder anisotropy through a ``quantum critical point'' (QCP). The nature of such a QCP has been a subject of recent studies by density matrix renormalization group. In this paper, we reexamine the ground state of the one doped hole, and show that a two-component structure is present in the density wave regime, in contrast to the single component in the Bloch-wave regime. In the former, the density wave itself is still contributed by a standing-wave-like component characterized by a quasiparticle spectral weight $Z$ in a finite-size system. But there is an additional charge incoherent component emerging, which intrinsically breaks the translational symmetry associated with the density wave. The partial momentum is carried away by neutral spin excitations. Such an incoherent part does not manifest in the single-particle spectral function, directly probed by the angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurement, however, it is demonstrated in the momentum distribution function. Landau's one-to-one correspondence hypothesis for a Fermi liquid breaks down here. The microscopic origin of this density wave state as an intrinsic manifestation of the doped Mott physics will be also discussed.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.98.035129

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A central issue of Mott physics, with symmetries being fully retained in the spin background, concerns the charge excitation. In a two-leg spin ladder with a spin gap, an injected hole can exhibit either a Bloch wave or a density wave by tuning the ladder anisotropy through a ``quantum critical point'' (QCP). The nature of such a QCP has been a subject of recent studies by density matrix renormalization group. In this paper, we reexamine the ground state of the one doped hole, and show that a two-component structure is present in the density wave regime, in contrast to the single component in the Bloch-wave regime. In the former, the density wave itself is still contributed by a standing-wave-like component characterized by a quasiparticle spectral weight ZZZ in a finite-size system. But there is an additional charge incoherent component emerging, which intrinsically breaks the translational symmetry associated with the density wave. The partial momentum is carried away by neutral spin excitations. Such an incoherent part does not manifest in the single-particle spectral function, directly probed by the angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurement, however, it is demonstrated in the momentum distribution function. Landau's one-to-one correspondence hypothesis for a Fermi liquid breaks down here. The microscopic origin of this density wave state as an intrinsic manifestation of the doped Mott physics will be also discussed.
We study a ground-state ansatz for the single-hole-doped $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}J$ model in two dimensions via a variational Monte Carlo method. Such a single-hole wave function possesses finite angular momenta generated by hidden spin currents, which give rise to a novel ground-state degeneracy in agreement with recent exact diagonalization (ED) and density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) results. We further show that the wave function can be decomposed into a quasiparticle component and an incoherent momentum distribution in excellent agreement with the DMRG results up to an $8\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}8$ lattice. Such a two-component structure indicates the breakdown of Landau's one-to-one correspondence principle, and in particular, the quasiparticle spectral weight vanishes by a power law in the large sample size limit. By contrast, turning off the phase string induced by the hole hopping in the so-called $\ensuremath{\sigma}\ifmmode\cdot\else\textperiodcentered\fi{}t\text{\ensuremath{-}}J$ model, a conventional Bloch-wave wave function with a finite quasiparticle spectral weight can be recovered, also in agreement with the ED and DMRG results. The present study shows that a singular effect already takes place in the single-hole-doped Mott insulator, by which the bare hole is turned into a non-Landau quasiparticle with translational-symmetry breaking. Generalizations to pairing and finite doping are briefly discussed.
The internal structure of doped holes in the Mott insulator may provide important insight into the physics of doped cuprates. Its observability via a single-particle probe by scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) is explored in this paper. Specifically, we study the single-particle spectral function based on a two-hole variational ground-state wave function [J.-Y. Zhao et al., Phys. Rev. X 12, 011062 (2022)] in the $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}J$ model. The latter as a strongly correlated state possesses a dichotomy of ddd-wave Cooper pairing and sss-wave ``twisted'' hole pairing. This pairing structure will give rise to two branches of local spectral function at finite energies. The low-lying one corresponds to a nodal-like quasiparticle excitation and the higher branch is associated with the pair breaking of ``twisted'' quasiparticles, with the threshold energy resembling a pseudogap, which is consistent with the recent STS observation. It can be further extended into energy spectra in momentum space measurable by ARPES, where the low-energy dispersion is also shown to agree well with the quantum Monte Carlo numerical result for a single hole. It implies that the dominant pairing force arises from the twisted holes showing up in the high-energy branch. The effect of the next-nearest-neighbor hopping integral ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ is also examined, which shows an interesting distinction between ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}/t>0$ and ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}/t\ensuremath{\le}0$ with a dramatic shift of the low-lying excitation from the nodal region to the antinodal region, but with the high-energy branch remaining insensitive to ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}$. Finally, a possible ``orthogonality catastrophe'' effect, namely, a ``dark matter'' component in the strongly correlated wave function that cannot be directly detected by the single-electron spectroscopy, is briefly discussed.
Experimental studies reveal a striking asymmetry in low-energy single-particle excitations between electron- and hole-doped cuprates. Electron-doped cuprates display a nontrivial dichotomy: Fermi-liquid-like behavior (suggesting weaker electronic correlations) coexists with correlation-driven features typical of hole-doped systems. This dual nature challenges a unified description within a doped Mott insulator framework. The present work addresses this issue by establishing that the ground-state wave function of the ttt-t′t't′-JJJ model generically possesses a two-component structure, comprising a coherent quasiparticle and an incoherent composite component. The kinetic energy arises from both the intrinsic propagation of the coherent quasiparticle and the resonance between these components. Using variational Monte Carlo at the level of a single hole, we show that for hole doping (t′<0t'<0t′<0), this resonance between components dominates and concentrates in the nodal region at low energies. This emergent propagation induced by resonance can be physically interpreted as originating from the recombination of fractionalized degrees of freedom, which drives various phenomena associated with strong correlations. Conversely, for electron doping (t′>0t'>0t′>0), the coherent quasiparticle propagation, which exhibits conventional properties of a Fermi liquid, is selectively enhanced in the antinodal region at low energies. This produces a separation in momentum space for systems with electron doping: the antinodal spectral weight at low energies is governed by the coherent quasiparticle, fundamentally differing from the nodal region, which remains dominated by the incoherent composite component. Motivated by such a structure and guided by experimental observations, we propose a phenomenological Green's function at finite doping, yielding spectral features consistent with experiments.
A hole injected into a Mott insulator will gain an internal structure as recently identified by exact numerics, which is characterized by a nontrivial quantum number whose nature is of central importance in understanding the Mott physics. In this work, we show that a spin texture associated with such an internal degree of freedom can explicitly manifest after the spin degeneracy is lifted by a weak Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC). It is described by an emergent angular momentum ${J}_{z}=\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}\frac{3}{2}$ as shown by both exact diagonalization and variational Monte Carlo calculations, which are in good agreement with each other at a finite size. In particular, as the internal structure such a spin texture is generally present in the hole composite even at high excited energies, such that a corresponding texture in momentum space, extending deep inside the Brillouin zone, can be directly probed by the spin-polarized angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). This is in contrast to a Landau quasiparticle under the SOC, in which the spin texture induced by SOC will not be protected once the excited energy is larger than the weak SOC coupling strength, away from the Fermi energy. We point out that the spin texture due to the SOC should be monotonically enhanced with reducing spin-spin correlation length in the superconducting-pseudogap phase at finite doping. A brief discussion of a recent experiment of the spin-polarized ARPES will be made.
In this paper, we have systematically studied the single-hole problem in two-leg Hubbard and $t\ensuremath{-}J$ ladders by large-scale density-matrix renormalization-group calculations. We found that the doped holes in both models behave similarly, while the three-site correlated hopping term is not important in determining the ground-state properties. For more insights, we have also calculated the elementary excitations, i.e., the energy gaps to the excited states of the system. In the strong-rung limit, we found that the doped hole behaves as a Bloch quasiparticle in both systems where the spin and charge of the doped hole are tightly bound together. In the isotropic limit, while the hole still behaves like a quasiparticle in the long-wavelength limit, our results show that its spin and charge components are only loosely bound together inside the quasiparticle, whose internal structure can lead to a visible residual effect which dramatically changes the local structure of the ground-state wave function.
For the ttt-JJJ model, variational wave functions can generally be constructed based on an accurate description of antiferromagnetism (AFM) at half-filling and an exact phase-string sign structure under doping. The single-hole-doped and two-hole-doped states, as determined by variational Monte Carlo (VMC) simulations, display sharply contrasting behaviors. The single-hole state constitutes a ``cat state'' that resonates strongly between a quasiparticle component and a local loop-current component, with approximately equal weights. In the ground state, the quasiparticle spectral weight ZkZ_{\mathbf{k}}Zk​ peaks at momenta k0≡(±π2,±π2)\mathbf{k}_0 \equiv (\pm\fracπ{2},\pm\fracπ{2})k0​≡(±2π​,±2π​). The total-energy dispersion versus k\mathbf{k}k agrees remarkably well with the Green function Monte Carlo results. However, Landau's one-to-one correspondence hypothesis for quasiparticles breaks down here with the incoherent component exhibiting intrinsic magnetization originating from a minimal 2×22\times22×2 loop current that forms a 4×44\times44×4 pattern on the square lattice--a finding in excellent agreement with density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) calculations. In the two-hole ground state, a new pairing mechanism is revealed: the two holes are automatically fused into a tightly bound object consisting of an incoherent dxyd_{xy}dxy​ pairing along the diagonal direction by compensating the local loop currents. This hole pair is again a ``cat state'' that resonates strongly between the incoherent dxyd_{xy}dxy​ and a coherent dx2−y2d_{x^2-y^2}dx2−y2​ Cooper channel to gain substantial hopping energy. Its size extends over an area of about 4×44\times 44×4 lattice spacings, much smaller than the divergent AFM correlation length, implying that it should survive as a minimal superconducting building block even in the dilute doping regime. Experimental implications and the generalization to the finite-doping case are briefly addressed.