Theoretical attempts to explain the origin of high temperature superconductivity are challenged by the complexity of the normal state, which exhibits three regimes with increasing hole doping: a pseudo-gap regime when underdoped, strange power laws near optimal doping and more conventional metallic behavior when heavily overdoped. We suggest that the origin of this behavior is linked to a zero temperature quantum phase transition separating the overdoped Fermi liquid from a spin-charge separated underdoped phase. Central to our analysis is a new
Z2 gauge theory formulation, which supports topological vortex excitations - dubbed visons. The visons are gapped in the underdoped phase, splitting the electron's charge and Fermi statistics into two separate excitations. Superconductivity occurs when the resulting charge
e boson condenses. The visons are condensed in the overdoped phase, thereby confining the charge and statistics of the electron leading to a Fermi liquid phase. Right at the quantum confinement transition the visons are in a critical state, leading to power law behavior for both charge and spin.
We describe the confining instabilities of a proposed quantum spin liquid underlying the pseudogap metal state of the hole-doped cuprates. The spin liquid can be described by a SU(2) gauge theory of N f = 2 massless Dirac fermions carrying fundamental gauge charges—this is the low-energy theory of a mean-field state of fermionic spinons moving on the square lattice with π -flux per plaquette in the ℤ 2 center of SU(2). This theory has an emergent SO(5) f global symmetry and is presumed to confine at low energies to the Néel state. At nonzero doping (or smaller Hubbard repulsion U at half-filling), we argue that confinement occurs via the Higgs condensation of bosonic chargons carrying fundamental SU(2) gauge charges also moving in π ℤ 2 -flux. At half-filling, the low-energy theory of the Higgs sector has N b = 2 relativistic bosons with a possible emergent SO(5) b global symmetry describing rotations between a d -wave superconductor, period-2 charge stripes, and the time-reversal breaking “ d -density wave” state. We propose a conformal SU(2) gauge theory with N f = 2 fundamental fermions, N b = 2 fundamental bosons, and a SO(5) f ×SO(5) b global symmetry, which describes a deconfined quantum critical point between a confining state which breaks SO(5) f and a confining state which breaks SO(5) b . The pattern of symmetry breaking within both SO(5)s is determined by terms likely irrelevant at the critical point, which can be chosen to obtain a transition between Néel order and d -wave superconductivity. A similar theory applies at nonzero doping and large U , with longer-range couplings of the chargons leading to charge order with longer periods.
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.
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 consider a SU(2) lattice gauge theory on the square lattice, with a single fundamental complex fermion and a single fundamental complex boson on each lattice site. Projective symmetries of the gauge-charged fermions are chosen so that they match with those of the spinons of the π -flux spin liquid. Global symmetries of all gauge-invariant observables are chosen to match with those of the particle-hole symmetric electronic Hubbard model at half-filling. Consequently, both the fundamental fermion and fundamental boson move in an average background π -flux, their gauge-invariant composite is the physical electron, and eliminating gauge fields in a strong gauge-coupling expansion yields an effective extended Hubbard model for the electrons. The SU(2) gauge theory displays several confining/Higgs phases: a nodal d -wave superconductor, and states with Néel, valence-bond solid, charge, or staggered current orders. There are also a number of quantum phase transitions between these phases that are very likely described by ( 2 + 1 ) -dimensional deconfined conformal gauge theories, and we present large flavor expansions for such theories. These include the phenomenologically attractive case of a transition between a conventional insulator with a charge gap and Néel order, and a conventional d -wave superconductor with gapless Bogoliubov quasiparticles at four nodal points in the Brillouin zone. We also apply our approach to the honeycomb lattice, where we find a bicritical point at the junction of Néel, valence bond solid (Kekulé), and Dirac semimetal phases.