We revisit the interpretation of quasiparticle scattering interference in cuprate high-
Tc superconductors. This phenomenon has been very successful in reconstructing the dispersions of
d-wave Bogoliubov excitations, but the successful identification and interpretation of quasiparticle interference (QPI) in scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) experiments rely on theoretical results obtained for the case of isolated impurities. We introduce a highly flexible technique to simulate STS measurements by computing the local density of states using real-space Green's functions defined on two-dimensional lattices with as many as 100 000 sites. We focus on the following question: to what extent can the experimental results be reproduced when various forms of distributed disorder are present? We consider randomly distributed pointlike impurities, smooth ``Coulombic'' disorder, and disorder arising from random on-site energies and superconducting gaps. We find an apparent paradox: the QPI peaks in the Fourier-transformed local density of states appear to be sharper and better defined in experiment than those seen in our simulations. We arrive at a no-go result for smooth-potential disorder since this does not reproduce the QPI peaks associated with large-momentum scattering. An ensemble of pointlike impurities gets closest to experiment, but this goes hand in hand with impurity cores that are not seen in experiment. We also study the effects of possible measurement artifacts (the ``fork mechanism''), which turn out to be of relatively minor consequence. It appears that a more microscopic model of the tunneling process needs to be incorporated in order to account for the sharpness of the experimentally obtained QPI peaks.
We study the effects of electron correlation on transport through an interacting region connected to multi-mode leads based on the perturbation expansion with respect to the inter-electron interaction. At zero temperature the conductance defined in the Kubo formalism can be written in terms of a single-particle Green's function at the Fermi energy, and it can be mapped onto a transmission coefficient of the free quasiparticles described by an effective Hamiltonian. We apply this formulation to a two-dimensional Hubbard model of finite size connected to two noninteracting leads. We calculate the conductance in the electron-hole symmetric case using the order
U2 self-energy. The conductance shows several maximums in the
U dependence in some parameter regions of
ty/tx, where
tx (
ty) is the hopping matrix element in the
x- (
y-) directions. This is caused by the resonance occurring in some of the subbands, and is related with the
U dependence of the eigenvalues of the effective Hamiltonian.
We show exactly with an SU(N) interacting model that even if the ambiguity associated with the placement of the chemical potential, μ, for a T=0 gapped system is removed by using the unique value μ(T→0), Luttinger's sum rule is violated even if the ground-state degeneracy is lifted by an infinitesimal hopping. The failure stems from the nonexistence of the Luttinger-Ward functional for a system in which the self-energy diverges. Since it is the existence of the Luttinger-Ward functional that is the basis for Luttinger's theorem which relates the charge density to sign changes of the single-particle Green function, no such theorem exists. Experimental data on the cuprates are presented which show a systematic deviation from the Luttinger count, implying a breakdown of the electron quasiparticle picture in strongly correlated electron matter.