In the hole-doped cuprates, the pseudogap refers to a suppression of the density of states at low energies, in the absence of superconducting long-range order. Numerous calculations of the Hubbard model show a pseudogap in the single-particle spectra, with striking similarities to photoemission and tunneling experiments on cuprates. However, no clear mechanism has been established. Here, we solve the Hubbard model on
2×2 clusters by exact diagonalization, with integration over twisted boundary conditions. A pseudogap is found in the single-particle density of states with the following characteristics: a decreasing energy scale and onset temperature for increased hole-doping, closure at a critical hole doping near 15\%, absence upon electron-doping, particle-hole asymmetry indicated by the location of the gap center, and persistence in the strong-coupling limit of
U/t→∞. Studying the many-body excitation spectrum reveals that the pseudogap in single-particle spectra is due to orthogonality between bare electrons and the lowest energy excitations for
U/t≳8.
We calculate the photoemission and inverse photoemission spectra of holes in copper-oxygen planes, the characteristic structural unit of high-temperature superconductors. The computations are based on the extended Hubbard or Emery model in the limit of infinitely strong Coulomb repulsion
Ud on copper sites. In order to evaluate the corresponding one-particle correlation functions the projection technique is applied, which is especially suitable for strongly correlated systems. Thereby the hole dynamics is restricted to a subspace of relevant operators, within which it can be treated exactly. In contrast to independent-particle approximations the excitation spectra show an energy gap at half-filling, which disappears when the system is doped with additional holes. Besides the insulator-to-metal transition the strong correlations lead also to a significant shift of spectral weight to states close to the Fermi energy when the hole concentration increases. Our results are in good agreement with the ones of exact diagonalization studies of the (
CuO2)4 cluster with periodic boundary conditions.
The concentration dependences of the band structure, spectral weight, density of states, and Fermi surface in the paramagnetic state are studied in the Hubbard model within cluster pertubation theory with 2 × 2 clusters. Representation of the Hubbard X operators makes it possible to control conservation of the spectral weight in constructing cluster perturbation theory. The calculated value of the ground-state energy is in good agreement with the results obtained using nonperturbative methods such as the quantum Monte Carlo method, exact diagonalization of a 4 × 4 cluster, and the variational Monte Carlo method. It is shown that in the case of hole doping, the states in the band gap (in-gap states) lie near the top of the lower Hubbard band for large values of U and near the bottom of the upper band for small U . The concentration dependence of the Fermi surface strongly depends on hopping to second ( t ′) and third ( t ″) neighbors. For parameter values typical of HTSC cuprates, the existence of three concentration regions with different Fermi surfaces is demonstrated. It is shown that broadening of the spectral electron density with an energy resolution typical of contemporary ARPES leads to a pattern of arcs with a length depending on the concentration. Only an order-of-magnitude decrease in the linewidth makes it possible to obtain the true Fermi surface from the spectral density. The kinks associated with strong electron correlations are detected in the dispersion relation below the Fermi level.
Calculations of the single-particle spectral function for the two-band Hubbard model as a function of doping and nearest-neighbor Coulomb repulsion are performed on finite-size clusters. It is shown that for hole doping the effect of the nearest-neighbor Coulomb repulsion leads to the effective pinning of the Fermi energy, and to the creation of new states in the charge-transfer gap. For electron doping, however, the model behaves as a one-band Hubbard model with the Fermi energy moving into the conduction band. The results of this calculation are in qualitative agreement with some of the spectroscopic studies of the electronic structure at the Fermi energy of the high-temperature cuprate superconductors.
On the basis of exact diagonalizations, a comparative study of two-particle optical and magnetic, as well as single-particle, excitations is presented for a two-dimensional (2D) multiorbital Hubbard model. For reasonable parameter sets appropriate for the cuprate superconductors, the single-particle excitations display strongly correlated states related to the Zhang-Rice Cu-O singlet construction. These states define the gap (to the upper Hubbard band) at half-filling and become partially occupied by doping holes in our 2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}2 unit-cell system. The optical results, which are the first quantitative calculations performed for realistic parameters of the three-band Hubbard model, clearly show three allowed optical transitions: (i) itinerant motion of the Cu-O singlets, having (for doping concentrations x\ensuremath{\ne}0) a spectral Drude distribution around \ensuremath{\omega}=0 with spectral weight proportional to x; (ii) unbinding of the O hole from the Cu spin in the singlet. This gives, in particular, a strong absorption peak due to singlet\ensuremath{\rightarrow}nonbonding oxygen transitions, again with relative weight \ensuremath{\sim}x.It is roughly centered at \ensuremath{\omega}\ensuremath{\sim}
JKondo, where
JKondo is the Kondo coupling and \ensuremath{\Delta} the bare Cu-O charge-transfer energy. It is this singlet unbinding that results in the by far dominant absorption structure between Drude and higher-energy Cu-O transitions and not the often discussed ``mid-infrared'' absorption due to transitions between different singlet states. (iii) Cu-O charge-transfer processes at energy \ensuremath{\sim}\ensuremath{\Delta}+
Upd. They show a pronounced excitonic effect due to the p-d interaction
Upd and have a reduced spectral weight shifted to higher energies for increased dopings. Findings (i)--(iii) are in general accordance with recent experimental data. Our study of the low-energy absorption is complemented with a numerical scaling analysis of the Drude weight in 1D, where, in particular, we find an interesting violation of Lenz's law for 4n-site Hubbard rings. Finally, the magnetic structure factor is calculated for the 2D case. For finite doping it contains a peak at 2
JKondo, which should be detectable in experiment.
Abstract With cuprate superconductors in mind, we study the effects of point-type impurity potential (V) on a d x 2−y 2 -wave superconducting (d-SC) state in a strongly correlated squarelattice Hubbard model (U/t = 12) with a diagonal transfer (t′), using a variational Monte Carlo method. At half filling, insulator-to-conductor (filling-control-type Mott) transitions occur at <?CDATA
V=VU(±)∼±U?> V = V U ( ± ) ∼ ± U . The phase realized for <?CDATA
V<VU(−)?> V < V U ( − ) is robust d-SC and the charge carriers are holes, whereas for <?CDATA
V>VU(+)?> V > V U ( + ) a metallic (or weak d-SC) state appears with charge carriers of electrons. For a partially-filled case where the impurity density is equal to the doping rate, a d-SC-to-insulator transition arises at V ≡ V M ∼ 4t. In the weak-|V| phases, the impurity effects in the electron distribution are smeared out by the screening effect, whereas in the strong-|V| phases, the electron distribution directly depend on the impurity configurations.