In recent years there has been significant work aimed at understanding what effect the variation of electronic doping has on material properties. In the high transition-temperature (high-T$_c$) cuprate superconductors hole doping has an impact on the superconducting transition temperature. In the underdoped regime, the cuprates exhibit anomalous properties due to a pseudogap which forms and is thought to be related to Mott insulating physics. While there is no general consensus as to the mechanism underlying high temperature superconductivity, the resonating valence bond (RVB) theory proposed by Anderson in 1987 with a Gutzwiller projected d-wave BCS wave function could give a first picture of the high-T$_c$ cuprates. We have calculated properties of the cuprates using the assumption that the pseudogap state acts as a normal state to an otherwise standard BCS mean field theory. We find that the phenomenological RVB spin liquid model proposed by Yang, Rice and Zhang (YRZ) is highly successful at describing the doping dependent features of the cuprates. Through application of the YRZ model and the tools of many-body theory we present results on anomalous properties observed in: electronic specific heat; Raman and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) data; effective mass renormalization; and thermal broadening seen in ARPES. We verify that the YRZ ansatz qualitatively describes these anomalies along with their doping dependent variations. We conclude from this work that the physics underlying the pseudogap, while distinct in origin from superconductivity, is likely to arise from an RVB wavefunction that is closely related to the BCS state. In graphene, variation in doping modifies the polarization function which describes a screened electron-electron interaction. This leads to additional features in the spectral function which are due to electron-plasmon coupling. In this work, we calculated the electronic density of states including this interaction along with its doping dependence with and without an electron-phonon interaction. We find clear features of electron-electron interactions in the density of states. These features are related to the energies of plasmaron bands in the spectral function and can be modified through doping so as to be distinct from the phonon energy scales.
In recent years there has been significant work aimed at understanding what effect the variation of electronic doping has on material properties. In the high transition-temperature (high-Tc) cuprate superconductors hole doping has an impact on the superconducting transition temperature. In the underdoped regime, the cuprates exhibit anomalous properties due to a pseudogap which forms and is thought to be related to Mott insulating physics. While there is no general consensus as to the mechanism underlying high temperature superconductivity, the resonating valence bond (RVB) theory proposed by Anderson in 1987 with a Gutzwiller projected d-wave BCS wave function could give a first picture of the high-Tc cuprates. We have calculated properties of the cuprates using the assumption that the pseudogap state acts as a normal state to an otherwise standard BCS mean field theory. We find that the phenomenological RVB spin liquid model proposed by Yang, Rice and Zhang (YRZ) is highly successful at describing the doping dependent features of the cuprates. Through application of the YRZ model and the tools of many-body theory we present results on anomalous properties observed in: electronic specific heat; Raman and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) data; effective mass renormalization; and thermal broadening seen in ARPES. We verify that the YRZ ansatz qualitatively describes these anomalies along with their doping dependent variations. We conclude from this work that the physics underlying the pseudogap, while distinct in origin from superconductivity, is likely to arise from an RVB wavefunction that is closely related to the BCS state. In graphene, variation in doping modifies the polarization function which describes a screened electron-electron interaction. This leads to additional features in the spectral function which are due to electron-plasmon coupling. In this work, we calculated the electronic density of states including this interaction along with its doping dependence with and without an electron-phonon interaction. We find clear features of electron-electron interactions in the density of states. These features are related to the energies of plasmaron bands in the spectral function and can be modified through doping so as to be distinct from the phonon energy scales.
Proximity to a Mott insulating phase is likely to be an important physical ingredient of a theory that aims to describe high-temperature superconductivity in the cuprates. Quantum cluster methods are well suited to describe the Mott phase. Hence, as a step toward a quantitative theory of the competition between antiferromagnetism and d-wave superconductivity in the cuprates, we use cellular dynamical mean-field theory to compute zero-temperature properties of the two-dimensional square lattice Hubbard model. The d-wave order parameter is found to scale like the superexchange coupling J for on-site interaction U comparable to or larger than the bandwidth. The order parameter also assumes a dome shape as a function of doping, while, by contrast, the gap in the single-particle density of states decreases monotonically with increasing doping. In the presence of a finite second neighbor hopping ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}$, the zero-temperature phase diagram displays the electron-hole asymmetric competition between antiferromagnetism and superconductivity that is observed experimentally in the cuprates. Adding realistic third neighbor hopping ${t}^{\ensuremath{''}}$ improves the overall agreement with the experimental phase diagram. Since band parameters can vary depending on the specific cuprate considered, the sensitivity of the theoretical phase diagram to band parameters challenges the commonly held assumption that the doping vs Tc∕Tcmax phase diagram of the cuprates is universal. The calculated angle-resolved photoemission spectrum displays the observed electron-hole asymmetry. The tendency to homogeneous coexistence of the superconducting and antiferromagnetic order parameters is stronger than observed in most experiments but consistent with many theoretical results and with experiments in some layered high-temperature superconductors. Clearly, our calculations reproduce important features of d-wave superconductivity in the cuprates that would otherwise be considered anomalous from the point of view of the standard Bardeen--Cooper--Schrieffer approach. At strong coupling, d-wave superconductivity and antiferromagnetism naturally appear as two equally important competing instabilities of the normal phase of the same underlying Hamiltonian.
Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) and maximum-entropy techniques are used to study the spectral function $A(\mathbf{p},\ensuremath{\omega})$ of the one-band Hubbard model with strong coupling including a next-nearest-neighbor electronic hopping with amplitude ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}/t=\ensuremath{-}0.35$. These values of parameters are chosen to improve the comparison of the Hubbard model with angle-resolved photoemission (ARPES) data for Sr2CuO2Cl2. A narrow quasiparticle (qp) band is observed in the QMC analysis at the temperature of the simulation T=t/3, both at and away from half-filling. Such a narrow band produces a large accumulation of weight in the density of states at the top of the valence band. As the electronic density 〈n〉 decreases further away from half-filling, the chemical potential travels through this energy window with a large number of states, and by $〈n〉\ensuremath{\sim}0.70$ it has crossed it entirely. The region near momentum $(0,\ensuremath{\pi})$ and $(\ensuremath{\pi},0)$ in the spectral function is more sensitive to doping than momenta along the diagonal from (0,0) to $(\ensuremath{\pi},\ensuremath{\pi})$. The evolution with hole density of the quasiparticle dispersion contains some of the features observed in recent ARPES data in the underdoped regime. For sufficiently large hole densities the ``flat'' bands at $(\ensuremath{\pi},0)$ cross the Fermi energy, a prediction that could be tested with ARPES techniques applied to overdoped cuprates. The population of the qp band introduces a hidden density in the system which produces interesting consequences when the quasiparticles are assumed to interact through antiferromagnetic fluctuations and studied with the BCS gap-equation formalism. In particular, a region of extended s-wave character is found to compete with the d wave in the overdoped regime, i.e., when the chemical potential has almost entirely crossed the qp band as 〈n〉 is reduced. The present study also shows that previous ``real-space'' pairing theories for the cuprates, such as the antiferromagnetic Van Hove scenario, originally constructed based on information gathered at half-filling, do not change their predictions if hole dispersions resembling noninteracting electrons with renormalized parameters are used.
The two-dimensional Hubbard model is studied within the composite operator method (COM) with the self-energy computed in the self-consistent Born approximation (SCBA). The COM describes interacting electrons in terms of the new elementary excitations that appear in the system owing to strong correlations; residual interactions among these excitations are treated within the SCBA. On decreasing the doping (from the overdoped to underdoped region), anomalous features develop in the spectral function $A(\mathbf{k},\ensuremath{\omega})$, the Fermi surface, the momentum distribution function n(k), the dispersion, and the density of states $N(\ensuremath{\omega})$ in the intermediate-coupling regime (U=8) at low temperatures (T=0.01−−0.02). At high doping (n=0.7), the system resembles an ordinary weakly interacting metal. At low doping (n=0.92), a pseudogap opens, hot and cold spots appear, and non-Fermi-liquid features develop. This behavior, together with the presence of kinks in the calculated electronic dispersion, is in agreement with angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy data for high-Tc cuprates superconductors.
We study electronic structure of hole- and electron-doped Mott insulators in the two-dimensional Hubbard model to reach a unified picture for the normal state of cuprate high-Tc superconductors. By using a cluster extension of the dynamical mean-field theory, we demonstrate that structure of coexisting zeros and poles of the single-particle Green's function holds the key to understand Mott physics in the underdoped region. We show evidence for the emergence of non-Fermi-liquid phase caused by the topological quantum phase transition of Fermi surface by analyzing low-energy charge dynamics. The spectra calculated in a wide range of energy and momentum reproduce various anomalous properties observed in experiments for the high-Tc cuprates. Our results reveal that the pseudogap in hole-doped cuprates has a d-wavelike structure only below the Fermi level while it retains non-d-wave structure with a fully opened gap above the Fermi energy even in the nodal direction due to a zero surface extending over the entire Brillouin zone. In addition to the non-d-wave pseudogap, the present comprehensive identifications of the spectral asymmetry as to the Fermi energy, the Fermi arc, and the back-bending behavior of the dispersion, waterfall, and low-energy kink, in agreement with the experimental anomalies of the cuprates, do not support that these originate from (the precursors of) symmetry breakings such as the preformed pairing and the d-density-wave fluctuations, but support that they are direct consequences of the proximity to the Mott insulator. Several possible experiments are further proposed to prove or disprove our zero mechanism.
In a recent review by Anderson and co-workers, it was pointed out that an early resonating valence bond (RVB) theory is able to explain a number of unusual properties of high-temperature superconducting (SC) Cu oxides. Here we extend previous calculations to study more systematically the low-energy physical properties of the plain vanilla d-wave RVB state, and to compare the results with the available experiments. We use a renormalized mean-field theory combined with variational Monte Carlo and power Lanczos methods to study the RVB state of an extended $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}J$ model in a square lattice with parameters suitable for the hole-doped Cu oxides. The physical observable quantities we study include the specific heat, the linear residual thermal conductivity, the in-plane magnetic penetration depth, the quasiparticle energy at the antinode $(\ensuremath{\pi},0)$, the superconducting energy gap, the quasiparticle spectra, and the Drude weights. The traits of nodes (including kF, the Fermi velocity vF, and the velocity along Fermi surface v2), and the SC order parameter are studied. Comparisons of the theory and the experiments in cuprates show an overall qualitative agreement, especially on their doping dependences.
The discovery of high-Tc superconductivity in the cuprates, and the observation that strong correlations are important in connection with these compounds has led to a tremendous interest in understanding the physics of strongly correlated electronic models. In particular the two simplest models for strongly correlated electrons, namely the Hubbard and t–J models, have been the subject of intensive studies. In a milestone paper of 1987, P.W. Anderson proposed that a resonating valence bond (RVB) wave-function, which consists of a superposition of valence-bond states, contains the ingredients to account for a consistent theory of the Hubbard and t–J models. Motivated by the success of variational Monte- Carlo to describe some of the peculiar properties of the cuprates, we propose in this dissertation, on one hand, to extend the method to further strongly correlated models to describe other compounds such as graphene, carbon nanotube or the cobaltite compounds, and on the other hand we propose to focus on the pseudo-gap phase of the cuprates, which is still prompting for a consistent theory. In particular, the issue of checkerboard spatial modulations in the density of states in the low temperature regime of the cuprates is addressed. Finally, we have studied the possibility for spontaneous orbital currents in the cuprates, that might play a key role in the theory of high Tc superconductors.