This thesis deals with different aspects of high temperature superconductivity in hole-doped cuprates. We assume the t - J model to describe the CuO2 planes of cuprates and we use a spin-charge gauge approach with spin-charge separation to describe holes in terms of a spinless fermion carrying the charge (holon) and a neutral boson carrying spin 1/2 (spinon), coupled by a slave-particle gauge field. In this framework we consider the effects of the presence of a finite density of incoherent holon pairs in the normal state as a precursor of superconductivity. We show that it is possible to take such pairs into account through a strongly direction dependent spectral weight for holons, which suppresses quasi-particles starting from the anti-nodal directions, and a wave function renormalization for the slave particle gauge field. In this way we prove that, when temperature is reduced, the formation of holon pairs causes both the deviation from linearity of the resistivity and the deviation from the constant value of the Knight shift. Moreover we point out the need for a negative next-nearest-neighbor hopping term ((t - t' - J model) to get a good continuum limit and to evaluate the Knight shift. These results are obtained through a Green's function, which follows naturally from the formalism and analytically interpolates between a Fermi liquid-like behavior and a d-wave superconductor when the coherence length of the holon pair order parameter is increased. The system preserves a finite Fermi surface until the superconducting transition, where it reduces to four nodes. Finally when, at lower temperatures, both the holon pairs and the RVB spinon pairs condense we enter the superconducting phase. In this phase we study the magnetic excitations showing how to extend to spin waves the hourglass-shape dispersion, found for spinons near the antiferromagnetic vector, if a suitable local mechanism of attraction between spinon and anti-spinon is assumed. The resulting spin wave Green's function, whose imaginary part is directly comparable with experiments, generates the hourglass with a finite gap between the two branches. Since the U(1) slave-particle gauge field gains mass in the superconducting phase via Anderson-Higgs mechanism, we propose the necessary mechanism of attraction comes from the unbroken Z2 subgroup of the U(1) gauge group.
This thesis deals with different aspects of high temperature superconductivity in hole-doped cuprates. We assume the t - J model to describe the CuO2 planes of cuprates and we use a spin-charge gauge approach with spin-charge separation to describe holes in terms of a spinless fermion carrying the charge (holon) and a neutral boson carrying spin 1/2 (spinon), coupled by a slave-particle gauge field. In this framework we consider the effects of the presence of a finite density of incoherent holon pairs in the normal state as a precursor of superconductivity. We show that it is possible to take such pairs into account through a strongly direction dependent spectral weight for holons, which suppresses quasi-particles starting from the anti-nodal directions, and a wave function renormalization for the slave particle gauge field. In this way we prove that, when temperature is reduced, the formation of holon pairs causes both the deviation from linearity of the resistivity and the deviation from the constant value of the Knight shift. Moreover we point out the need for a negative next-nearest-neighbor hopping term ((t - t' - J model) to get a good continuum limit and to evaluate the Knight shift. These results are obtained through a Green's function, which follows naturally from the formalism and analytically interpolates between a Fermi liquid-like behavior and a d-wave superconductor when the coherence length of the holon pair order parameter is increased. The system preserves a finite Fermi surface until the superconducting transition, where it reduces to four nodes. Finally when, at lower temperatures, both the holon pairs and the RVB spinon pairs condense we enter the superconducting phase. In this phase we study the magnetic excitations showing how to extend to spin waves the hourglass-shape dispersion, found for spinons near the antiferromagnetic vector, if a suitable local mechanism of attraction between spinon and anti-spinon is assumed. The resulting spin wave Green's function, whose imaginary part is directly comparable with experiments, generates the hourglass with a finite gap between the two branches. Since the U(1) slave-particle gauge field gains mass in the superconducting phase via Anderson-Higgs mechanism, we propose the necessary mechanism of attraction comes from the unbroken Z2 subgroup of the U(1) gauge group.
The U(1) slave-boson mean-field theory of the t - J model has been used by many authors as a starting point for the theoretical analysis of high - Tc cuprate superconductors. With suitable refinements, the theory can explain a lot of qualitative features of cuprates. However, the theory does not produce a correct description of the low-energy quasi-particle properties in the under-doped regime. There exist several possible schemes to resolve this difficulty, among them, one generalizes the U(1) theory to SU(2) formulation and the other introduces confinement between spinons and holons. In this thesis, we generalize the Landau transport equations of the U(1) slave-boson mean-field theory of the t - J model to the SU(2) formulation. We first generalize the SU(2) slave-boson mean-field theory to the time-dependent regime. After eliminating the boson and constraint fields exactly in the linear-response regime at zero-temperature, we obtain a set of transport equations for quasi-particles, which has a similar structure as the Landau transport equations for Fermi-liquid superconductors, with all the Landau parameters explicitly given except that besides the usual effective interaction in the particle-hole channel in Fermi-liquid theory, we find an effective interaction in the particle-particle channel, which reflects the SU(2) symmetry between particles and holes. The transport equation is SU(2) invariant at half-filling. Around q⃗ = 0, the electron density couples only to the transverse part of the external field and the quasi-particle charge is still of order x. Besides the SU(2) formulation approach, we also investigate spinon-holon confinement in the U(1) slave-boson theory. The optical and thermal conduc-tivities of U (1) slave-boson theory with confinement are calculated. For optical conductivity, we consider only the contributions from static impurities. The qualitative behavior of our results agrees with experimental results. However, to explain the experiments quantitatively, we need to study further the con-tributions from phonons. We found a phenomenological effective Hamiltonian for the quasi-particle Green's functions in the U(1) slave-boson theory with spinon-hoion confinement. Starting from this effective Hamiltonian, we exam-ine the thermal conductivity within the theory. In particular, we compare the thermal conductivity for four different situations: (i) the ordinary d-wave su-perconducting state with four Dirac Fermi points; (ii) the normal metal state with a half-pocket Fermi surface; (iii) the spinon-holon confinement supercon-ducting state with a half-pocket Fermi surface; (iv) BCS superconducting state with a half-pocket Fermi surface.
We study the slave-boson $t\ensuremath{-}J$ model of cuprates with high superconducting transition temperatures, and derive its low-energy effective field theory for the charge-spin separated state in a self-consistent manner. The phase degrees of freedom of the mean field for hoppings of holons and spinons can be regarded as a U(1) gauge field, Ai. The charge-spin separation occurs below a certain temperature, TCSS, as a deconfinement phenomenon of the dynamics of Ai. Below a certain temperature TSG(<TCSS), the spin-gap phase develops as the Higgs phase of the gauge-field dynamics, and Ai acquires a mass mA. The effective field theory near TSG takes the form of a Ginzburg-Landau theory of a complex scalar field $\ensuremath{\lambda}$ coupled with Ai, where $\ensuremath{\lambda}$ represents d-wave pairings of spinons. Three dimensionality of the system is crucial to realize a phase transition at TSG. By using this field theory, we calculate the dc resistivity $\ensuremath{\rho}.$ At T>TSG, $\ensuremath{\rho}$ is proportional to T. At T<TSG, it deviates downward from the T-linear behavior as $\ensuremath{\rho}\ensuremath{\propto}T{1\ensuremath{-}{c(T}_{\mathrm{SG}}\ensuremath{-}{T)}^{d}}.$ When the system is near (but not) two dimensional, due to the compactness of the phase of the field $\ensuremath{\lambda},$ the exponent d deviates from its mean-field value 1/2 and becomes a nonuniversal quantity which depends on temperature and doping. This significantly improves the comparison with the experimental data.
We study a system of doped antiferromagnet in three dimensions at finite temperatures using the t-J model, a canonical model of strongly correlated electrons. We employ the slave-fermion representation of electrons, in which an electron is described as a composite of a charged spinless holon and a chargeless spinon. We introduce two kinds of U(1) gauge fields on links as auxiliary fields, one describing resonating valence bonds of antiferromagnetic nearest-neighbor spin pairs and the other for nearest-neighbor hopping amplitudes of holons and spinons in the ferromagnetic channel. To perform a numerical study of the system, we integrate out the fermionic holon field by using the hopping expansion in powers of the hopping amplitude, which is legitimate for the region in and near the insulating phase. The resultant effective model is described in terms of bosonic spinons, two U(1) gauge fields, and a collective field for hole pairs. We study this model by means of Monte Carlo simulations, calculating the specific heat, spin correlation functions, and instanton densities. We obtain a phase diagram in the hole concentration-temperature plane, which is in good agreement with that observed recently for clean and homogeneous underdoped samples.
Within the framework of a relativistic non-Abelian gauge theory approach to the physics of spin–charge separation in doped quantum antiferromagnetic planar systems, proposed recently by the authors, we are examining here the effects of constant external magnetic fields on excitations about the superconducting state in the model. The electrically-charged Dirac fermions (holons), describing excitations about specific points on the fermi surface, e.g. those corresponding to the nodes of a d-wave superconducting gap in high-T c cuprates, condense, resulting in the opening of a Kosterlitz–Thouless–like gap (KT) at such nodes. This leads, in general, to a second superconducting phase transition, which occurs at low temperatures[Formula: see text], in addition to the high-T c superconductivity [Formula: see text] due to the bulk of the fermi surface for holons in a (d-wave) spin–charge separated superconductor. In the presence of strong external magnetic fields at the surface regions of the planar superconductor, in the direction perpendicular to the superconducting planes, these KT gaps appear to be enhanced. Our preliminary analysis, based on analytic Schwinger–Dyson treatments, seems to indicate that for an even number of Dirac fermion species, required in our model as a result of gauging a particle–hole SU(2) symmetry, Parity or Time Reversal violation does not necessarily occurs. Based on these considerations, we argue that recent experimental findings, concerning thermal conductivity plateaux of quasiparticles in planar high-T c cuprates in strong external magnetic fields, may indicate the presence of such KT gaps, caused by charged Dirac-fermion excitations in these materials, as suggested in the above model.
The Chern-Simons bosonization with $\mathrm{U}(1)\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}\mathrm{SU}(2)$ gauge field is applied to the two-dimensional $t\ensuremath{-}J$ model in the limit $t\ensuremath{\gg}J,$ to study the normal-state properties of underdoped cuprate superconductors. We prove the existence of an upper bound on the partition function for holons in a spinon background, and we find the optimal spinon configuration saturating the upper bound on average---a coexisting flux phase and s+id-like resonating-valence-bond state. After neglecting the feedback of holon fluctuations on the U(1) field B and spinon fluctuations on the SU(2) field V, the holon field is a fermion and the spinon field is a hard-core boson. Within this approximation we show that the B field produces a \ensuremath{\pi} flux phase for the holons, converting them into Dirac-like fermions, while the V field, taking into account the feedback of holons produces a gap for the spinons vanishing in the zero-doping limit. The nonlinear-\ensuremath{\sigma} model with a mass term describes the crossover from the short-ranged antiferromagnetic (AF) state in doped samples to long-range AF order in reference compounds. Moreover, we derive a low-energy effective action in terms of spinons, holons and a self-generated U(1) gauge field. Neglecting the gauge fluctuations, the holons are described by the Fermi-liquid theory with a Fermi surface consisting of four ``half-pockets'' centered at (\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}\ensuremath{\pi}/2,\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}\ensuremath{\pi}/2) and one reproduces the results for the electron spectral function obtained in the mean-field approximation, in agreement with the photoemission data on underdoped cuprates. The gauge fluctuations are not confining due to coupling to holons, but nevertheless yield an attractive interaction between spinons and holons leading to a bound state with electron quantum numbers. The renormalization effects due to gauge fluctuations give rise to non-Fermi-liquid behavior for the composite electron, in certain temperature range showing the linear in T resistivity. This formalism provides a new interpretation of the spin gap in the underdoped superconductors (mainly due to the short-ranged AF order) and predicts that the minimal gap for the physical electron is proportional to the square root of the doping concentration. Therefore the gap does not vanish in any direction. All these predictions can be checked explicitly in experiment.
To supplement our recent brief report on the theory of holon-pair boson approach to the t-J Hamiltonian [S.-S. Lee and Sung-Ho Suck Salk, Phys. Rev. B {\bf 64}, 052501(2001)], in this paper we present a full exposure to the theory, detailed physical implications and predicted various physical properties of high Tc cuprates. We discuss the significance of coupling (interplay) between the spin and charge degrees of freedom in the Heisenberg interaction term of the t-J Hamiltonian. We discuss its importance in causing the arch-shaped superconducting transition temperature Tc and the pseudogap (spin gap) temperature T∗ tangential to Tc in the overdoped region in the observed phase diagram of high Tc cuprates. A universal parabolic scaling behavior of T∗/Tc (or Tc/T∗) with hole doping concentration is predicted in agreement with observations, indicating that there exists correlation between the pseudogap (spin gap) phase and the superconducting phase through antiferromagnetic fluctuations. Our proposed holon-pair boson theory is shown to be self-consistent in that it not only yields the arch (dome) shape structure of Tc but also reproduces various other physical properties such as superfluid weight, bose condensation energy, spectral function, optical conductivity and spin susceptibility, including their temperature and doping dependence.