We model the underdoped cuprates using fermions moving in a background with local antiferromagnetic order. The antiferromagnetic order fluctuates in orientation, but not in magnitude, so that there is no long-range antiferromagnetism, but a ``topological'' order survives. The normal state is described as a fractionalized Fermi liquid (FL*), with electronlike quasiparticles coupled to the fractionalized excitations of the fluctuating antiferromagnet. The electronic quasiparticles reside near pocket Fermi surfaces enclosing total area
x (the dopant density), centered away from the magnetic Brillouin zone boundary. The violation of the conventional Luttinger theorem is linked to a ``species doubling'' of these quasiparticles. We describe phenomenological theories of the pairing of these quasiparticles, and show that a large class of mean-field theories generically displays a nodal-antinodal ``dichotomy'': The interplay of local antiferromagnetism and pairing leads to a small gap near the nodes of the
d-wave pairing along the Brillouin zone diagonals, and a large gap in the antinodal region.
We study the superconducting state of the hole-doped two-dimensional Hubbard model using cellular dynamical mean-field theory, with the Lanczos method as impurity solver. In the underdoped regime, we find a natural decomposition of the one-particle (photoemission) energy gap into two components. The gap in the nodal regions, stemming from the anomalous self-energy, decreases with decreasing doping. The antinodal gap has an additional contribution from the normal component of the self-energy, inherited from the normal-state pseudogap, and it increases as the Mott insulating phase is approached.
The microscopical analysis of the unconventional and puzzling physics of the underdoped cuprates, as carried out lately by means of the composite operator method (COM) applied to the 2D Hubbard model, is reviewed and systematized. The 2D Hubbard model has been adopted as it has been considered the minimal model capable of describing the most peculiar features of cuprates held responsible for their anomalous behavior. COM is designed to endorse, since its foundation, the systematic emergence in any SCS of new elementary excitations described by composite operators obeying noncanonical algebras. In this case (underdoped cuprates—2D Hubbard model), the residual interactions—beyond a 2-pole approximation—between the new elementary electronic excitations, dictated by the strong local Coulomb repulsion and well described by the two Hubbard composite operators, have been treated within the noncrossing approximation. Given this recipe and exploiting the few unknowns to enforce the Pauli principle content in the solution, it is possible to qualitatively describe some of the anomalous features of high-Tc cuprate superconductors such as large versus small Fermi surface dichotomy, Fermi surface deconstruction (appearance of Fermi arcs), nodal versus antinodal physics, pseudogap(s), and kinks in the electronic dispersion. The resulting scenario envisages a smooth crossover between an ordinary weakly interacting metal sustaining weak, short-range antiferromagnetic correlations in the overdoped regime to an unconventional poor metal characterized by very strong, long-but-finite-range antiferromagnetic correlations leading to momentum-selective non-Fermi liquid features as well as to the opening of a pseudogap and to the striking differences between the nodal and the antinodal dynamics in the underdoped regime.