One of the key motivations for the development of atomically resolved spectroscopic imaging STM (SI-STM) has been to probe the electronic structure of cuprate high temperature superconductors. In both the d-wave superconducting (dSC) and the pseudogap (PG) phases of underdoped cuprates, two distinct classes of electronic states are observed using SI-STM. The first class consists of the dispersive Bogoliubov quasiparticles of a homogeneous d-wave superconductor. These are detected below a lower energy scale |E|={Delta}0 and only upon a momentum space (k-space) arc which terminates near the lines connecting k=pm({pi}/a0,0) to k=pm(0, {pi}/a0). In both the dSC and PG phases, the only broken symmetries detected in the |E|leq {Delta}0 states are those of a d-wave superconductor. The second class of states occurs at energies near the pseudogap energy scale |E| {Delta}1 which is associated conventionally with the antinodal states near k=pm({pi}/a0,0) and k=pm(0, {pi}/a0). We find that these states break the 90o-rotational (C4) symmetry of electronic structure within CuO2 unit cells, at least down to 180o rotational (C2) symmetry (nematic) but in a spatially disordered fashion. This intra-unit-cell C4 symmetry breaking coexists at |E| {Delta}1 with incommensurate conductance modulations locally breaking both rotational and translational symmetries (smectic). The properties of these two classes of |E| {Delta}1 states are indistinguishable in the dSC and PG phases. To explain this segregation of k-space into the two regimes distinguished by the symmetries of their electronic states and their energy scales |E| {Delta}1 and |E|leq{Delta}0, and to understand how this impacts the electronic phase diagram and the mechanism of high-Tc superconductivity, represents one of a key challenges for cuprate studies.
In the stripe-ordered state of a strongly-correlated two-dimensional electronic system, under a set of special circumstances, the superconducting condensate, like the magnetic order, can occur at a non-zero wave-vector corresponding to a spatial period double that of the charge order. In this case, the Josephson coupling between near neighbor planes, especially in a crystal with the special structure of La_{2-x}Ba_xCuO_4, vanishes identically. We propose that this is the underlying cause of the dynamical decoupling of the layers recently observed in transport measurements at x=1/8.
