No Arabic abstract
X-ray absorption spectra on the overdoped high-temperature superconductors Tl_2Ba_2CuO_{6+delta} (Tl-2201) and La_{2-x}Sr_xCuO_{4+delta} (LSCO) reveal a striking departure in the electronic structure from that of the underdoped regime. The upper Hubbard band, identified with strong correlation effects, is not observed on the oxygen K edge, while the lowest-energy prepeak gains less intensity than expected above p ~ 0.21. This suggests a breakdown of the Zhang-Rice singlet approximation and a loss of correlation effects or a significant shift in the most fundamental parameters of the system, rendering single-band Hubbard models inapplicable. Such fundamental changes suggest that the overdoped regime may offer a distinct route to understanding in the cuprates.
A recent article suggested that the saturation of low energy spectral weight observed by X-ray absorption spectroscopy in the cuprates at high hole doping could be explained within the single-band Hubbard model. We show that this result is an artifact of inappropriate integration limits.
We study oxygen K-edge x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and investigate the validity of the Zhang-Rice singlet (ZRS) picture in overdoped cuprate superconductors. Using large-scale exact diagonalization of the three-orbital Hubbard model, we observe the effect of strong correlations manifesting in a dynamical spectral weight transfer from the upper Hubbard band to the ZRS band. The quantitative agreement between theory and experiment highlights an additional spectral weight reshuffling due to core-hole interaction. Our results confirm the important correlated nature of the cuprates and elucidate the changing orbital character of the low-energy quasi-particles, but also demonstrate the continued relevance of the ZRS even in the overdoped region.
We argue that recent measurements on both the superfluid density and the optical conductivity of high-quality LSCO films can be understood almost entirely within the theory of disordered BCS d-wave superconductors. The large scattering rates deduced from experiments are shown to arise predominantly from weak scatterers, probably the Sr dopants out of the CuO$_2$ plane, and correspond to significant suppression of $T_c$ relative to a pure reference state with the same doping. Our results confirm the conventional viewpoint that the overdoped side of the cuprate phase diagram can be viewed as approaching the BCS weak-coupling description of the superconducting state, with significant many-body renormalization of the plasma frequency. They suggest that, while some of the decrease in $T_c$ with overdoping may be due to weakening of the pairing, disorder plays an essential role.
Following the discovery of superconductivity in the cuprates and the seminal work by Anderson, the theoretical efforts to understand high-temperature superconductivity have been focusing to a large extent on a simple model: the one-band Hubbard model. However, superconducting cuprates need to be doped, and the doped holes go into the oxygen orbitals. This requires a more elaborate multi-band model such as the three-orbital Emery model. The recently discovered nickelate superconductors appear, at first glance, to be even more complicated multi-orbital systems. Here, we analyse this multi-orbital system and find that it is instead the nickelates which can be described by a one-band Hubbard model, albeit with an additional electron reservoir and only around the superconducting regime. Our calculations of the critical temperature Tc are in good agreement with experiment, and show that optimal doping is slightly below the 20% Sr-doping of Ref. 11. Even more promising than 3d nickelates are 4d palladates.
In the 35 years since the discovery of cuprate superconductors, we have not yet reached a unified understanding of their properties, including their material dependence of the superconducting transition temperature $T_{text{c}}$. The preceding theoretical and experimental studies have provided an overall picture of the phase diagram, and some important parameters for the $T_{text{c}}$, such as the contribution of the Cu $d_{z^2}$ orbital to the Fermi surface and the site-energy difference $Delta_{dp}$ between the Cu $d_{x^2-y^2}$ and O $p$ orbitals. However, they are somewhat empirical and limited in scope, always including exceptions, and do not provide a comprehensive view of the series of cuprates. Here we propose a four-band $d$-$p$ model as a minimal model to study material dependence in cuprates. Using the variational Monte Carlo method, we theoretically investigate the phase diagram for the La$_2$CuO$_4$ and HgBa$_2$CuO$_4$ systems and the correlation between the key parameters and the superconductivity. Our results comprehensively account for the empirical correlation between $T_{text{c}}$ and model parameters, and thus can provide a guideline for new material design. We also show that the effect of the nearest-neighbor $d$-$d$ Coulomb interaction $V_{dd}$ is actually quite important for the stability of superconductivity and phase competition.