The mechanism that leads to high‐temperature superconductivity in cuprates remains an open question despite intense study for nearly two decades. Here, we introduce an SU(4) model for cuprate systems having many similarities to dynamical symmetries known to play an important role in nuclear structure physics and in elementary particle physics. Analytical solutions in three dynamical symmetry limits of this model are found: an SO(4) limit associated with antiferromagnetic order; an SU(2) limit that may be interpreted as a d‐wave pairing condensate; and an SO(5) limit that may be interpreted as a doorway state between the antiferromagnetic order and the superconducting order. It is demonstrated that with a slightly broken SO(5) but under constraint of the parent SU(4) symmetry, the model is capable of describing the rich physics that is crucial in explaining why cuprate systems that are antiferromagnetic Mott insulators at half filling become superconductors through hole doping.
We propose a class of wave functions that provide a unified description of antiferromagnetism and d-wave superconductivity in (doped) Mott insulators. The wave function has a Jastrow form and prohibits double occupancies. In the absence of holes, the wave function describes antiferromagnetism accurately. Off diagonal long range order develops at finite doping and the superconducting order parameter has d-wave symmetry. We also show how nodal quasiparticles and neutral spin excitations can be constructed from this wave function.
We construct a class of projected SO(5) models where the Gutzwiller constraint of no-double-occupancy is implemented exactly. We introduce the concept of projected SO(5) symmetry where all static correlation functions are exactly SO(5) symmetric and discuss the signature of the projected SO(5) symmetry in dynamical correlation functions. We show that this class of projected SO(5) models can give a realistic description of the global phase diagram of the high-
Tc superconductors and account for many of their physical properties.
One path to high-temperature cuprate superconductors is doping a Mott insulator. In this paper, we study this system from the view point of higher-form symmetries. On the introduction of slave bosons, the $t\ensuremath{-}J$ model at a finite hole doping can be written in the form of U(1) gauge theories. After a duality transformation, they can be written as a generalized
BF theory, in which the higher-form symmetries are more manifest. We identify the emergent continuous and discrete higher-form symmetries in both
s-wave and
d-wave superconducting phases, expected to be realized from a doped Mott insulator. The existence of a topological order is tested by examining if there is a spontaneously broken discrete one-form symmetry. We claim that a spontaneous breaking of discrete one-form symmetry may extend to a phase that has massless Dirac fermions in the limit of large number of flavors. We discuss the possibility of a topological phase transition inside the superconducting dome of high-
Tc cuprates.
In this work, we present numerical results which support SO(5) symmetry as a concept unifying superconductivity and antiferromagnetism in the high-temperature superconductors. Using exact cluster diagonalization, we verify the recently proposed SO(5) multiplet structures for a widely used microscopic model, the t-J model. Our results show that the d-wave superconducting ground states away from half-filling are obtained from the higher spin states at half-filling through SO(5) rotations, that the dominant low energy resonance in the dynamical spin correlation function corresponds to a `pi-resonance' in the entire low doping region, and that the SO(5) symmetry is robust against inclusion of longer ranged Coulomb repulsion and next-nearest neighbor hopping.
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.