Identification of the electronic state that appears upon doping a Mott insulator is important to understand the physics of cuprate high-temperature superconductors. Recent scanning tunneling microscopy of cuprates provides evidence that a charge-ordered state emerges before the superconducting state upon doping the parent compound. We study this phenomenon by computing the charge response function of the Hubbard model including frequency-dependent local vertex corrections that satisfy the compressibility sum rule. We find that upon approaching the Mott phase from the overdoped side, the charge fluctuations at wave vectors connecting hot spots are suppressed much faster than at the other wave vectors. It leads to a momentum dependence of the dressed charge susceptibility that is very different from either the bare susceptibility or from the susceptibility obtained from the random phase approximation. We also find that the paramagnetic lightly hole-doped Mott phase at finite temperature is unstable to charge ordering only at zero wave vector, confirming the results previously obtained from the compressibility. Charge order is driven by the frequency-dependent scattering processes that induce an attractive particle-hole interaction at large interaction strength and small doping.
Identification of the electronic state that appears upon doping a Mott insulator is important to understand the physics of cuprate high-temperature superconductors. Recent scanning tunneling microscopy of cuprates provides evidence that a charge-ordered state emerges before the superconducting state upon doping the parent compound. We study this phenomenon by computing the charge response function of the Hubbard model including frequency-dependent local vertex corrections that satisfy the compressibility sum rule. We find that upon approaching the Mott phase from the overdoped side, the charge fluctuations at wave vectors connecting hot spots are suppressed much faster than at the other wave vectors. It leads to a momentum dependence of the dressed charge susceptibility that is very different from either the bare susceptibility or from the susceptibility obtained from the random phase approximation. We also find that the paramagnetic lightly hole-doped Mott phase at finite temperature is unstable to charge ordering only at zero wave vector, confirming the results previously obtained from the compressibility. Charge order is driven by the frequency-dependent scattering processes that induce an attractive particle-hole interaction at large interaction strength and small doping.
There is growing evidence that the hole-doped single-band Hubbard and t - J models do not have a superconducting ground state reflective of the high-temperature cuprate superconductors but instead have striped spin- and charge-ordered ground states. Nevertheless, it is proposed that these models may still provide an effective low-energy model for electron-doped materials. Here we study the finite temperature spin and charge correlations in the electron-doped Hubbard model using quantum Monte Carlo dynamical cluster approximation calculations and contrast their behavior with those found on the hole-doped side of the phase diagram. We find evidence for a charge modulation with both checkerboard and unidirectional components decoupled from any spin-density modulations. These correlations are inconsistent with a weak-coupling description based on Fermi surface nesting, and their doping dependence agrees qualitatively with resonant inelastic x-ray scattering measurements. Our results provide evidence that the single-band Hubbard model describes the electron-doped cuprates.
Understanding the mechanism of Cooper pairing amounts to determining the effective interaction that operates at low energies. Efforts to achieve such a goal for superconducting materials, especially strongly correlated ones, from both bottom-up and top-down approaches, have been plagued by having to use uncontrolled approximations. Here, we perform large-scale, numerically exact, sign-problem-free zero-temperature quantum Monte Carlo simulations on an effective theory based on ``hot spots'' plus fluctuating collective modes. Because hot spots are clearly identified by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy for electron-doped cuprates, we focus our attention on such materials. Our goal is to determine the minimum effective action that can describe the observed superconductivity and charge-density wave. The results suggest that antiferromagnetic fluctuation alone is not sufficient---the effective action needs to be amended with nematic fluctuations. We believe that our results address the pairing mechanism of high-Tc superconductivity in electron-doped cuprates, and they shed light on the pairing mechanism of hole-doped cuprates.
Evolution of superconductivity from charge clusters to stripes in the t-t′-J model
Competition and coexistence of charge orders and superconductivity are hallmarks in many strongly correlated electron systems. Here, we unravel the precise role of charge fluctuations on the superconducting state in the t-t′-J model of the high-temperature cuprate superconductors. Using finite-temperature tensor network simulations, we investigate thermal snapshots in the underdoped regime where the ground state features a superconducting stripe phase. At intermediate temperatures, where stripes have melted and hole clustering is observed, we find that pairing correlations are tightly localized on the hole clusters. Upon entering the stripe regime at lower temperatures, pairing increasingly delocalizes across different hole clusters to ultimately become coherent across the full system in the ground state. This pair-charge locking gives rise to an intuitive picture of the parent state of the superconducting stripe phase: pairing is localized on hole clusters formed via hole attraction due to the onset of magnetic correlations at intermediate temperature. We discuss how this microscopic picture is consistent with a broad range of experimental observations in cuprate superconductors, including scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) evidence for local pairing above Tc and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) signatures of charge clustering in the underdoped regime.
Understanding the impact of electronic correlations onto the properties of cuprate superconductors is one of the most prominent tasks of solid state physics. In particular, the intermingling of short range strong correlations, driving the Mott or charge-transfer insulator in the parent compound, and the long range antiferromagnetic scattering processes in the highly doped regime poses severe difficulties to the theoretical description. This thesis studies the impact of short and intermediate ranged strong correlations on the electronic properties of the 2D Hubbard model in the half-filled and doped cases by means of cellular dynamical mean-field theory (CDMFT), i.e. real-space clusters embedded in a dynamical mean-field. Specifically, the effect of incorporating gradually longer ranged correlations onto the metal-insulator transition is analysed and dynamic next-neighbour spin correlations are identified as the cause of the insulating state. Furthermore, by introducing the Bethe-Salpeter scheme for embedded clusters, spin, charge and pairing susceptibilities are computed, incorporating the short ranged strong correlations exactly via the effective interaction of CDMFT and at the same time treating long-ranged fluctuations in a perturbative manner. Firstly, this allows to study the charge response at the Mott transition, identifying the non-local extended s-wave character of the transition. Secondly, in the hole-doped case, the pseudogap, the Knight-shift, a d-wave superconducting instability and unilateral charge instabilities with a periodicity of 4 lattice sites in the s-wave and d-wave channel are observed, all of which strongly depend on next-neighbour spin singlet-like correlations contained in the effective interaction of CDMFT. This work paves the way for computing the conductivity at the boundary between the pseudogap regime and the Fermi liquid. This doctoral thesis was conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research and the University of Stuttgart.
Recent resonant x-ray scattering (RXS) experiments revealed a novel charge order in extremely overdoped ${\mathrm{La}}_{2\ensuremath{-}x}{\mathrm{Sr}}_{x}{\mathrm{CuO}}_{4}$ (LSCO) [Li et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 131, 116002 (2023)]. The observed charge order appears around the $(\ensuremath{\pi}/3,0)$ wave vector, distinct from the well-known stripe fluctuations near 1/8 doping, and persists from cryogenic temperatures to room temperature. To investigate the origin of this charge order in the overdoped regime, we use determinant quantum Monte Carlo (DQMC) simulations to examine correlated models with various interactions. We demonstrate that this distinctive CDW originates from remnant correlations in extremely overdoped cuprates, with its specific pattern shaped by interactions beyond the Hubbard model, particularly electron-phonon couplings. The persistence of the $(\ensuremath{\pi}/3,0)$ wave vector across different doping levels indicates the presence of nonlocal couplings. Our study reveals the significant role of phonons in cuprates, which assist correlated electrons in the formation of unconventional phases.
The generic phase diagram of lightly hole doped high-Tc cuprates hosts an antiferromagnetic insulating phase with well-defined spin-wave excitations. Contrary to the weak-coupling prediction, these modes persist up to the overdoped metallic regime as intense and dispersive paramagnons. Here we report on our study of the low-energy magnetic and charge excitations within the extended Hubbard model at strong coupling, using a modified 1/N expansion method with a variational state serving as the saddle point solution. Despite clear separation of magnetic and Hubbard-U energy scales, we find that incipient Mottness affects qualitatively dispersions and widths of magnetic modes throughout the entire phase diagram. The obtained magnetic and charge dynamical structure factors agree semiquantitatively with recent resonant x-ray and neutron scattering data for ${\mathrm{La}}_{2\ensuremath{-}\mathit{x}}{\mathrm{Sr}}_{\mathit{x}}{\mathrm{CuO}}_{4}$ and ${(\mathrm{Bi},\mathrm{Pb})}_{2}{(\mathrm{Sr},\mathrm{La})}_{2}{\mathrm{CuO}}_{6+\ensuremath{\delta}}$ at all available doping levels. The weak-coupling random-phase approximation fails already for underdoped samples, pointing to the nontrivial intertwining of distinct energy scales in cuprate superconductors. The existence of a discrete charge mode which splits off the electron-hole continuum is also predicted.