The motion of a single hole in a two-dimensional Heisenberg antiferromagnet (hAF) is studied in a representation where holes are described as spinless fermions (holons) and spins as normal bosons. Assuming long-range AF order the spin dynamics is treated in linear spin-wave theory. The formulation highlights the close relation with the conventional polaron problem. The holon Green's function is calculated self-consistently within the Born approximation using finite-cluster geometries for the numerical solution. As a remarkable result we find close agreement with the spectral function A(k,\ensuremath{\omega}) of a hole calculated by exact diagonalization methods. A(k,\ensuremath{\omega}) is characterized by a narrow quasiparticle (QP) peak at the low-energy side of the spectrum, which is well separated from the incoherent part for large enough J values. A complete characterization of our solution is given, including the spectral weight, the dispersion relation, and effective masses of the QP state. A finite-size-scaling study gives a nonvanishing spectral weight of the QP in the thermodynamic limit for values J/t typical for copper oxide superconductors. Our calculations indicate that the self-consistent Born approximation is a valuable scheme for characterizing the dynamics of a hole in the t-J model, even in the strong-coupling regime.
We solved numerically the integral equation for the selfenergy which describes the motion of a single hole in a two-dimensional quantum antiferromagnet (AF) within the selfconsistent Born approximation. This formulation stresses the similarity of the AF-spin polaron with the standard polaron problem. We confine our calculation to finite cluster geometries and compare with results from previous exact diagonalization studies. The spectral function is characterized by a narrow quasiparticle (qp) peak at the low energy side of the spectra, which appears to be well separated from the incoherent band part for large enough J values. For small J we find a reduced width of ~7t for the incoherent band. The bottom of the coherent qp band always occurs at (±π/2, ±π/2). Its bandwidth initially increases with J until J≃t and then decreases as 2t2/J. A complete characterization of our solution is given, including the dispersion relation and effective masses of this quasiparticle. The comparison with exact diagonalization studies for a 4×4 cluster is remarkably good. From our results we see that a lattice of 16×16 sites describes adequately the thermodynamic limit. We conclude that the simple Born approximation is a valuable scheme to characterize the dynamics of one hole in the t-J model. both in the perturbative and the strong coupling regimes.
We apply a finite-temperature functional-integral approach by means of which Arovas and Auerbach analyzed low-dimensional Heisenberg spin models to the t-J model in the slave-fermion representation. Using a perturbation theory of the t-J model for t\ensuremath{\ll}J, self-consistent equations are derived for finite hole concentration that reduce to those in the case of the pure Heisenberg spin model, i.e., to those of Arovas and Auerbach, and Takahashi as a special case. Numerical solution of the corresponding self-consistent equations for the one-dimensional t-J model at sufficiently low temperature suggests that, if the transfer t is not too large, there is a phase-separation state into a hole-rich and a no-hole phase as conjectured recently by Emery et al.
A finite-size scaling analysis of the spectral function and of the optical conductivity of a single hole moving in an antiferromagnetic background is performed. It is shown that both the low-energy quasiparticle peak and the broad higher-energy structure are robust with increasing cluster size from 4\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}4 to \ensuremath{\surd}26 \ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{} \ensuremath{\surd}26 sites. In the absence of spin fluctuations, for most static or dynamical quantities saturation occurs when the size exceeds a characteristic size
Nc(
Jz). Typically, 16- and 26-site clusters give reliable results for
Jz>0.75 and
Jz>0.3, respectively. The hole optical mass is shown to be very large (>20) in agreement with the small bandwidth. Due to the energy gap to flip a spin in the vicinity of a hole, a small gap \ensuremath{\propto}
Jz separates the low-energy \ensuremath{\delta} function from the rest of the spectrum in the dynamical correlation functions. On the other hand, with ${\mathit{J}}_{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\perp}}}$ this gap seems to disappear with increasing system size as one would expect since the spin waves are gapless in the thermodynamic limit. The large momentum dependence of the quasiparticle weight in the isotropic case is inconsistent with a string picture but agrees well with the self-consistent Born approximation.An accurate estimation of the higher-energy part of the spectral functions of the t-J model can be made for momenta close to (0,0) or (\ensuremath{\pi},\ensuremath{\pi}); it consists of a broad featureless band. For momenta close to the Fermi surface, no evidence for excited string states is found. This may be either because the string scenario breaks down or because exact calculations at momenta near (\ensuremath{\pi}/2,\ensuremath{\pi}/2) are limited by the differing geometries of the finite clusters. In the Ising limit, the spectral function also depends crucially on the momentum, but a feature resembling a string excitation is seen for momenta close to (0,0). Our data on the finite-frequency optical conductivity of a single hole in the t-J model reveal that the total spectral weight at finite frequency has a strong size dependence and decreases with increasing size (for J not too small). This suggests that the optical mass and the optical absorption of the t-J model may have been overestimated in the past.
We study the propagation of a single hole in the spin-density-wave state of the half-filled two-dimensional Hubbard model. This state is insulating not because of strong electron correlations, but because of the single-particle gap caused by magnetic ordering. We calculate the self-energy of the hole in the one-loop approximation and solve the Dyson equation to extract quantities such as the quasihole spectral function, energy dispersion, and lifetime. At all values of U we find a quasiparticle peak in the hole spectral function. The strength of the peak decreases as
t2/
U2 for large U. We calculate the shape of the quasihole Fermi surface and find that it consists of four pockets around the points (\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}\ensuremath{\pi}/2,\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}\ensuremath{\pi}/2). Finally, we discuss the large-U extrapolation of our theory and compare our results with those of recent mean-field theories of the strong-coupling antiferromagnet.
We revisit the problem of the dispersion of a single hole injected into a quantum antiferromagnet. We applied a spin-density-wave formalism extended to a large number of orbitals and obtained an integral equation for the full quasiparticle Green's function in the self-consistent ``noncrossing'' Born approximation. We found that for $t/J\ensuremath{\gg}1$, the bare fermionic dispersion is completely overshadowed by the self-energy corrections. In this case, the quasiparticle Green's function contains a broad incoherent continuum which extends over a frequency range of $\ensuremath{\sim}6t$. In addition, there exists a narrow region of width
O(JS) below the top of the valence band, where the excitations are mostly coherent, though with a small quasiparticle residue $Z\ensuremath{\sim}J/t$. The top of the valence band is located at $(\ensuremath{\pi}/2,\ensuremath{\pi}/2)$. We found that the form of the fermionic dispersion, and, in particular, the ratio of the effective masses near $(\ensuremath{\pi}/2,\ensuremath{\pi}/2)$ strongly depend on the assumptions one makes for the form of the magnon propagator. We argue in this paper that two-magnon Raman scattering as well as neutron-scattering experiments strongly suggest that the zone-boundary magnons are not free particles since a substantial portion of their spectral weight is transferred into an incoherent background. We modeled this effect by introducing a cutoff
qc in the integration over magnon momenta. We found analytically that for small
qc, the strong-coupling solution for the Green's function is universal, and both effective masses are equal to ${(4JS)}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$. We further computed the full fermionic dispersion for
J/t=0.4 relevant for
Sr2CuO2Cl2, and ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}=\ensuremath{-}0.4J$ and found not only that the masses are both equal to ${(2J)}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$, but also that the energies at
(0,0) and $(0,\ensuremath{\pi})$ are equal, the energy at $(0,\ensuremath{\pi}/2)$ is about half of that at
(0,0), and the bandwidth for the coherent excitations is around
3J. All of these results are in full agreement with the experimental data. Finally, we found that weakly damped excitations only exist in a narrow range around $(\ensuremath{\pi}/2,\ensuremath{\pi}/2)$. Away from the vicinity of $(\ensuremath{\pi}/2,\ensuremath{\pi}/2)$, the excitations are overdamped, and the spectral function possesses a broad maximum rather than a sharp quasiparticle peak. This last feature was also reported in photoemission experiments.