Stability of inhomogeneous superconducting states in the doped t-J model

Federico Becca, Luca Capriotti, Sandro Sorella

Kazuhiro Kuboki

In order to study the time-reversal symmetry (${\cal T}$) breaking near a (110) surface of a high-$T_C$ cuprate YBCO, we consider the flux phase in a bilayer $t-J$ model. Although the stable solution in the bulk is the $d_{x^2-y-2}$-wave superconducting (SC) state, free energy of the flux phase is close to it, and thus the flux phase may occur when the SC order is disturbed by inhomogeneity, e.g., surface or impurity. It is found that, depending on the doping rate, the flux phase in which spontaneous magnetic fields in two layers have opposite signs may be stabilized. This may lead to a surface state with local ${\cal T}$ violation but without local magnetic field.

Kazuhiro Kuboki, Hideki Tanaka, Manfred Sigrist

Chung-Pin Chou, Ting-Kuo Lee

We carry out the variational Monte Carlo calculation to examine spatially inhomogeneous states in hole- and electron-doped cuprates. By using Gutzwiller approximation, we consider the excitations, arising from charge density, spin density and pair field, of the mean-field ground state of the t-J model. It leads to the stripe patterns we have found numerically in a generalized t-J-type model including mass renormalization from the electron-phonon coupling. In the hole-doped side, a robust d-wave superconducting order results in the formation of the half-doped antiferromagnetic resonating-valence-bond (AF-RVB) stripes shown by the well-known Yamada plot. On the other hand, due to a long-range AF order in electron-doped materials, a stripe structure with the "in-phase" magnetic domain (IPMD) is obtained in the underdoped regime instead of the AF-RVB stripe. The IPMD stripe with the largest period permitted by lattice size is stabilized near the underdoped region and it excludes the Yamada plot from electron-doped cases. Based on finite lattice size to which we can reach, the existence of IPMD stripes may imply an electronic phase separation into an electron-rich and an insulating half-filled AF long-range ordered domains in electron-doped compounds.

Anurag Banerjee, C. Pépin, Amit Ghosal

The coexistence of multiple quasidegenerate orders is the hallmark of the strongly correlated materials. Experiments often reveal several spatially modulated orders in the underdoped cuprates. This has come to the forefront with the possible detection of the pair density wave states. However, microscopic calculations often struggle to stabilize such spatially modulating orders as the ground state in the strong correlation limit. This work uses the $t\ensuremath{-}{t}^{\ensuremath{'}}\ensuremath{-}J$ model with an additional nearest-neighbor repulsion to stabilize spatially oscillating charge, bond, and pairing orders in the underdoped regime. We employ the standard Gutzwiller approach while treating the inhomogeneity for the spatial orders using the self-consistent Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov methodology. Our calculations reveal that unidirectional bond density states coexisting with charge and pairing modulations can have lower energy than the uniform superconducting state over an extensive doping range. These modulating states vanish monotonically as the modulation wave vector becomes shorter with increased dopings. The finite momentum orders give way to a vestigial nematic phase on increasing doping which only breaks the rotational symmetry of the system. The nematic order vanishes on further increasing doping, and only uniform superconductivity survives. The spatial features of the ground state at each doping reveal multiple wave vectors, which potentially drive the incommensuration of charge orders. Interestingly, the spatially modulating states are absent when the strong correlations criteria are relaxed, suggesting that the removal of double occupancy aids the stabilization of density wave orders.

Hiroki Tsuchiura, Yukio Tanaka, Masao Ogata +1 more