No Arabic abstract
Unravelling the nature of doping-induced transition between a Mott insulator and a weakly correlated metal is crucial to understanding novel emergent phases in strongly correlated materials. For this purpose, we study the evolution of spectral properties upon doping Mott insulating states, by utilizing the cluster perturbation theory on the Hubbard and t-J-like models. Specifically, a quasi-free dispersion crossing the Fermi level develops with small doping, and it eventually evolves into the most dominant feature at high doping levels. Although this dispersion is related to the free electron hopping, our study shows that this spectral feature is in fact influenced inherently by both electron-electron correlation and spin exchange interaction: the correlation destroys coherence, while the coupling between spin and mobile charge restores it in the photoemission spectrum. Due to the persistent impact of correlations and spin physics, the onset of gaps or the high-energy anomaly in the spectral functions can be expected in doped Mott insulators.
In the framework of cluster perturbation theory for the 2D Hubbard and Hubbard-Holstein models at low hole doping we have studied the effect of local and short-range correlations in strongly correlated systems on the anomalous features in the electronic spectrum by investigating the fine structure of quasiparticle bands. Different anomalous features of spectrum are obtained as the result of intrinsic properties of strongly correlated electron and polaron bands in the presence of short-range correlations. Particularly, features similar to the electron-like Fermi-pockets of cuprates at hole doping $psim0.1$ are obtained without ad hoc introducing a charge density wave order parameter within the Hubbard model in a unified manner with other known peculiarities of the pseudogap phase like Fermi-arcs, pockets, waterfalls, and kink-like features. The Fermi surface is mainly formed by dispersive quasiparticle bands with large spectral weight, formed by coherent low-energy exications. Within the Hubbard-Holstein model at moderate phonon frequencies we show that modest values of local electron-phonon interaction are capable of introducing low-energy kink-like features and affecting the Fermi surface by hybridization of the fermionic quasiparticle bands with the Franck-Condon resonances.
It is widely believed that high-temperature superconductivity in the cuprates emerges from doped Mott insulators. The physics of the parent state seems deceivingly simple: The hopping of the electrons from site to site is prohibited because their on-site Coulomb repulsion U is larger than the kinetic energy gain t. When doping these materials by inserting a small percentage of extra carriers, the electrons become mobile but the strong correlations from the Mott state are thought to survive; inhomogeneous electronic order, a mysterious pseudogap and, eventually, superconductivity appear. How the insertion of dopant atoms drives this evolution is not known, nor whether these phenomena are mere distractions specific to hole-doped cuprates or represent the genuine physics of doped Mott insulators. Here, we visualize the evolution of the electronic states of (Sr1-xLax)2IrO4, which is an effective spin-1/2 Mott insulator like the cuprates, but is chemically radically different. Using spectroscopic-imaging STM, we find that for doping concentration of x=5%, an inhomogeneous, phase separated state emerges, with the nucleation of pseudogap puddles around clusters of dopant atoms. Within these puddles, we observe the same glassy electronic order that is so iconic for the underdoped cuprates. Further, we illuminate the genesis of this state using the unique possibility to localize dopant atoms on topographs in these samples. At low doping, we find evidence for much deeper trapping of carriers compared to the cuprates. This leads to fully gapped spectra with the chemical potential at mid-gap, which abruptly collapse at a threshold of around 4%. Our results clarify the melting of the Mott state, and establish phase separation and electronic order as generic features of doped Mott insulators.
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 towards a quantitative theory of the competition between antiferromagnetism (AFM) and d-wave superconductivity (SC) 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, 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 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 T_{c}/T_{c}^{max} phase diagram of the cuprates is universal. The calculated ARPES spectrum displays the observed electron-hole asymmetry. 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 BCS approach.
We demonstrate that the sign structure of the t-J model on a hypercubic lattice is entirely different from that of a Fermi gas, by inspecting the high temperature expansion of the partition function up to all orders, as well as the multi-hole propagator of the half-filled state and the perturbative expansion of the ground state energy. We show that while the fermion signs can be completely gauged away by a Marshall sign transformation at half-filling, the bulk of the signs can be also gauged away in a doped case, leaving behind a rarified irreducible sign structure that can be enumerated easily by counting exchanges of holes with themselves and spins on their real space paths. Such a sparse sign structure implies a mutual statistics for the quantum states of the doped Mott insulator.
A hole injected into a Mott insulator will gain an internal structure as recently identified by exact numerics, which is characterized by a nontrivial quantum number whose nature is of central importance in understanding the Mott physics. In this work, we show that a spin texture associated with such an internal degree of freedom can explicitly manifest after the spin degeneracy is lifted by a emph{weak} Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC). It is described by an emergent angular momentum $J_{z}=pm3/2$ as shown by both exact diagonalization (ED) and variational Monte Carlo (VMC) calculations, which are in good agreement with each other at a finite size. In particular, as the internal structure such a spin texture is generally present in the hole composite even at high excited energies, such that a corresponding texture in momentum space, extending deep inside the Brillouin zone, can be directly probed by the spin-polarized angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). This is in contrast to a Landau quasiparticle under the SOC, in which the spin texture induced by SOC will not be protected once the excited energy is larger than the weak SOC coupling strength, away from the Fermi energy. We point out that the spin texture due to the SOC should be monotonically enhanced with reducing spin-spin correlation length in the superconducting/pseudogap phase at finite doping. A brief discussion of a recent experiment of the spin-polarized ARPES will be made.