The energy spectrum of a mobile hole in a two-band model for Cu oxides, in the limit where the virtual transitions of two holes on the Cu atoms dominate, is shown by using an exact mapping to be identical to that of an effective Hamiltonian of the strongly correlated single-band Hubbard model.
Strong coupling diagram technique equations are derived for hole Green’s functions of the three-band Hubbard model, which describes Cu–O planes of high-[Formula: see text] cuprates. The equations are self-consistently solved in the approximation, in which the series for the irreducible part in powers of the oxygen–copper hopping constant is truncated to two lowest-order terms. For parameters used for hole-doped cuprates, the calculated energy spectrum consists of lower and upper Hubbard subbands of predominantly copper nature, oxygen bands with a small admixture of copper states and the Zhang–Rice states of mixed nature, which are located between the lower Hubbard subband and oxygen bands. The spectrum contains also pseudogaps near transition frequencies of Hubbard atoms on copper sites.
Strong-coupling models for the electronic structure of La2CuO4 are derived from the local-density-functional results in two successive stages of renormalization. First, a three-band Hubbard model is derived with parameters explicitly calculated from first principles using a constrained density-functional approach and a mean-field fit to the Cu-O pd\ensuremath{\sigma} bands. Second, exact diagonalization studies of finite clusters within the three-band Hubbard model are used to select and map the low-energy spectra onto effective one-band Hamiltonians, e.g., the Heisenberg, one-band Hubbard, or ``t-t'-J'' model. At each stage, calculated observables are in quantitative agreement with experiment.
A Hamiltonian for the motion of oxygen holes strongly coupled to the Cu spins in a one-dimensional (1D) Cu-O lattice is solved exactly for all dopings. This Hamiltonian retains the dominant O-hole hopping term, that is, spin-exchange hopping of the hole spin with the intervening Cu spin and neglects the weaker non-spin-exchange hopping term. The excitations naturally separate into two independent quasiparticles: spinons and holons. It is this Hamiltonian that should be taken as the correct zeroth-order Hamiltonian from which perturbation theory should be applied. We show that the spinon spectrum is the spectrum of the 1D antiferromagnet incommensurate with the Cu lattice and the holons are spinless noninteracting fermions in a cosine band. The Cu-Cu spin correlation in the ground state increases linearly with doping from antiferromagnetic (-0.443) at x=0 to ferromagnetic (\ensuremath{\approxeq}0.19) at x=1.
We calculate the properties of the two-band Hubbard model using the dynamical cluster approximation. The phase diagram resembles the generic phase diagram of the cuprates, showing a strong asymmetry with respect to electron- and hole-doped regimes, in agreement with experiment. Asymmetric features are also seen in one-particle spectral functions and in the charge, spin, and d-wave pairing-susceptibility functions. We address the possible reduction of the two-band model to a low-energy single-band one, as it was suggested by Zhang and Rice. Comparing the two-band Hubbard model properties with the single-band Hubbard model ones, we have found similar low-energy physics provided that the next-nearest-neighbor hopping term ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ has a significant value $({t}^{\ensuremath{'}}∕t\ensuremath{\approx}0.3)$. The parameter ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ is the main culprit for the electron-hole asymmetry. However, a significant value of ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ cannot be provided in a strict Zhang and Rice [Phys. Rev. B 37, R3759 (1988); 41, 7243 (1990)] picture where the extra holes added into the system bind to the existing Cu holes forming local singlets. We note that by considering approximate singlet states, such as plaquette states, reasonable values of ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}$, which capture qualitatively the physics of the two-band model, can be obtained. We conclude that a single-band $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}{t}^{\ensuremath{'}}\text{\ensuremath{-}}U$ Hubbard model captures the basic physics of the cuprates concerning superconductivity, antiferromagnetism, pseudogap, and electron-hole asymmetry, but is not suitable for a quantitative analysis or to describe physical properties involving energy scales larger than about 0.5 eV.