We revisit the problem of the dispersion of a single hole injected into a quantum antiferromagnet. We applied a spin-density-wave formalism extended to a large number of orbitals and obtained an integral equation for the full quasiparticle Green's function in the self-consistent ``noncrossing'' Born approximation. We found that for $t/J\ensuremath{\gg}1$, the bare fermionic dispersion is completely overshadowed by the self-energy corrections. In this case, the quasiparticle Green's function contains a broad incoherent continuum which extends over a frequency range of $\ensuremath{\sim}6t$. In addition, there exists a narrow region of width
O(JS) below the top of the valence band, where the excitations are mostly coherent, though with a small quasiparticle residue $Z\ensuremath{\sim}J/t$. The top of the valence band is located at $(\ensuremath{\pi}/2,\ensuremath{\pi}/2)$. We found that the form of the fermionic dispersion, and, in particular, the ratio of the effective masses near $(\ensuremath{\pi}/2,\ensuremath{\pi}/2)$ strongly depend on the assumptions one makes for the form of the magnon propagator. We argue in this paper that two-magnon Raman scattering as well as neutron-scattering experiments strongly suggest that the zone-boundary magnons are not free particles since a substantial portion of their spectral weight is transferred into an incoherent background. We modeled this effect by introducing a cutoff
qc in the integration over magnon momenta. We found analytically that for small
qc, the strong-coupling solution for the Green's function is universal, and both effective masses are equal to ${(4JS)}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$. We further computed the full fermionic dispersion for
J/t=0.4 relevant for
Sr2CuO2Cl2, and ${t}^{\ensuremath{'}}=\ensuremath{-}0.4J$ and found not only that the masses are both equal to ${(2J)}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$, but also that the energies at
(0,0) and $(0,\ensuremath{\pi})$ are equal, the energy at $(0,\ensuremath{\pi}/2)$ is about half of that at
(0,0), and the bandwidth for the coherent excitations is around
3J. All of these results are in full agreement with the experimental data. Finally, we found that weakly damped excitations only exist in a narrow range around $(\ensuremath{\pi}/2,\ensuremath{\pi}/2)$. Away from the vicinity of $(\ensuremath{\pi}/2,\ensuremath{\pi}/2)$, the excitations are overdamped, and the spectral function possesses a broad maximum rather than a sharp quasiparticle peak. This last feature was also reported in photoemission experiments.
We present results of an exact diagonalization calculation of the spectral function A(k,\ensuremath{\omega}) for a single hole described by the t-J model propagating on a 32-site square cluster. The minimum energy state is found at a crystal momentum k=(\ensuremath{\pi}/2,\ensuremath{\pi}/2), consistent with theory, and our measured dispersion relation agrees well with that determined using the self-consistent Born approximation. In contrast to smaller cluster studies, our spectra show no evidence of string resonances. We also make a qualitative comparison of the variation of the spectral weight in various regions of the first Brillouin zone with recent angle-resolved-photoemission data.
In Chapter 1, we introduce the physics of the HTSC, starting with an historical overview of the problem and describing some experimental results that characterize these materials. Subsequently, we introduce the t−J model, which allows a microscopic description of the HTSC and we introduce the Resonating Valence Bond (RVB) wave function. In Chapter 2, we will describe the numerical techniques used for obtaining the results of our thesis. We start from the Lanczos method, that enable us to obtain exact results for small cluster size and then we enter in the topic of the quantum Monte Carlo technique. We describe the variational Monte Carlo method, the optimization algorithm and we will introduce the Green’s function Monte Carlo and fixed-node approximation, that improve the variational results. In Chapter 3, we will introduce our new variational wave function which generalizes the RVB state we show our results on the charge fluctuations (phase separation problem) for the two-dimensional t−J model. The main results of this chapter has been published in Physical Review B [7]. In Chapter 4, we will study the magnetic and superconducting properties of the two-dimensional t−J and t−t′−J model, trying to understand the role of the next-nearest-neighbor hopping term on the magnetic and superconducting phases. We will show a phase diagram of the magnetic and superconducting correlations, which qualitatively reproduce the actual phase diagram of HTSC and gives some indication on the origin of the electronic pairing. The main results of this chapter were submitted to Physical Review B [8].
The report discusses the slave-fermion representations of the t-J model and describes another representation, in which fermions and bosons are completely commuting and in which the properties of fermions are directly related to the properties of physical holes. For a study of the system in the new representation at half-filling, interaction of fermions with two magnons is treated in mean-field theory. The obtained effective model, in comparison to that of the usual slave-fermion representation, has an additional bare hole dispersion due to the hole moving by using quantum spin fluctuations present in the undoped antiferromagnetic ground state. The single-hole Green's function at half-filling is then found numerically using the self-consistent Born approximation. For all studied quantities good or excellent agreement with numerical data is observed in the entire parameter range, noticeably better than in the studies with the slave-fermion representation. Using the same effective model, the two-hole problem is also studied by solving numerically the Bethe-Salpeter equation with noncrossing diagrams.
We present quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations for a single hole in a $t\ensuremath{-}J$ model from
J=0.4t to
J=4t on square lattices with up to $24\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}24$ sites. The lower edge of the spectrum is directly extracted from the imaginary time Green's function. In agreement with earlier calculations, we find flat bands around $(0,\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}\ensuremath{\pi}),$ $(\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}\ensuremath{\pi},0)$ and the minimum of the dispersion at $(\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}\ensuremath{\pi}/2,\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}\ensuremath{\pi}/2).$ For small J, both self-consistent Born approximation and series expansions give a bandwidth for the lower edge of the spectrum in agreement with the simulations, whereas for
J/t>1, only series expansions agree quantitatively with our QMC results. This band corresponds to a coherent quasiparticle. This is shown by a finite-size scaling of the quasiparticle weight $Z(\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{k})$ that leads to a finite result in the thermodynamic limit for the considered values of
J/t. The spectral function $A(\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{k},\ensuremath{\omega})$ is obtained from the imaginary time Green's function via the maximum entropy method. Resonances above the lowest edge of the spectrum are identified, whose J dependence is quantitatively described by string excitations up to
J/t=2.The report discusses the slave-fermion representations of the t-J model and describes another representation, in which fermions and bosons are completely commuting and in which the properties of fermions are directly related to the properties of physical holes. For a study of the system in the new representation at half-filling, interaction of fermions with two magnons is treated in mean-field theory. The obtained effective model, in comparison to that of the usual slave-fermion representation, has an additional bare hole dispersion due to the hole moving by using quantum spin fluctuations present in the undoped antiferromagnetic ground state. The single-hole Green's function at half-filling is then found numerically using the self-consistent Born approximation. For all studied quantities good or excellent agreement with numerical data is observed in the entire parameter range, noticeably better than in the studies with the slave-fermion representation. Using the same effective model, the two-hole problem is also studied by solving numerically the Bethe-Salpeter equation with noncrossing diagrams.