Person:

Allais, Andrea

We examine the influence of strong on-site Coulomb interactions on instabilities of the metallic state on the square lattice to general forms of bond order. The Mott correlations are accounted for by the auxiliary-boson method, and by dynamical mean field theory calculations, complementing our recent work using Gutzwiller projected variational wavefunctions. By the present methods, we find that the on-site Mott correlations do not significantly modify the structure of the bond ordering instabilities which preserve time-reversal symmetry, but they do enhance the instability towards time-reversal symmetry breaking “staggered flux” states.

Insulating quantum spin liquids can undergo a confinement transition to a valence bond solid via the condensation of topological excitations of the associated gauge theory. We extend the theory of such transitions to fractionalized Fermi liquids (FL*): these are metallic doped spin liquids in which the Fermi surfaces only have gauge neutral quasiparticles. Using insights from a duality transform on a doped quantum dimer model for the U(1)-FL* state, we show that projective symmetry group of the theory of the topological excitations remains unmodified, but the Fermi surfaces can lead to additional frustrating interactions. We propose a theory for the confinement transition of Z2-FL* states via the condensation of visons. A variety of confining, incommensurate density wave states are possible, including some that are similar to the incommensurate d-form factor density wave order observed in several recent experiments on the cuprate superconductors.

The nature of the pseudogap regime of cuprate superconductors at low hole density remains unresolved. It has a number of seemingly distinct experimental signatures: a suppression of the paramagnetic spin susceptibility at high temperatures, low-energy electronic excitations that extend over arcs in the Brillouin zone, X-ray detection of charge-density wave order at intermediate temperatures and quantum oscillations at high magnetic fields and low temperatures. Here we show that a model of competing charge-density wave and superconducting orders provides a unified description of the intermediate and low-temperature regimes. We treat quantum oscillations at high field beyond semiclassical approximations, and find clear and robust signatures of an electron pocket compatible with existing observations; we also predict oscillations due to additional hole pockets. In the zero-field and intermediate temperature regime, we compute the electronic spectrum in the presence of thermally fluctuating charge-density and superconducting orders. Our results are compatible with experimental trends.

We describe the dynamics of a single fermion in a dispersionless band coupled to the 2+1 dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) describing the quantum phase transition of a bosonic order parameter with N components. The fermionic spectral functions are expected to apply to the vicinity of quantum critical points in two-dimensional metals over an intermediate temperature regime where the Landau damping of the order parameter can be neglected. Some of our results are obtained by a mapping to an auxiliary problem of a CFT containing a defect line with an external field which locally breaks the global O(N) symmetry.

We propose a quantum dimer model for the metallic state of the hole-doped cuprates at low hole density, p. The Hilbert space is spanned by spinless, neutral, bosonic dimers and spin S=1/2S=1/2, charge +e+e fermionic dimers. The model realizes a “fractionalized Fermi liquid” with no symmetry breaking and small hole pocket Fermi surfaces enclosing a total area determined by p. Exact diagonalization, on lattices of sizes up to 8×88×8, shows anisotropic quasiparticle residue around the pocket Fermi surfaces. We discuss the relationship to experiments.

Motivated by recent experimental evidence of charge order in the pseudogap phase of cuprates, we perform a variational analysis of spin-singlet density wave ordering in metals with antiferromagnetic interactions on the square lattice, using a wave function with double occupancy projected out. We examine ordering with and without time-reversal symmetry, with an arbitrary wave vector and a tunable form factor. Depending on parameters, we find d-form factor density wave ordering, with a wave vector either parallel to the lattice generators or diagonally oriented, or a ground state which carries a time-reversal breaking pattern of spontaneous currents.

The identity of the fundamental broken symmetry (if any) in the underdoped cuprates is unresolved. However, evidence has been accumulating that this state may be an unconventional density wave. Here we carry out site-specific measurements within each CuO2 unit cell, segregating the results into three separate electronic structure images containing only the Cu sites [Cu(r)] and only the x/y axis O sites [Ox(r) and Oy(r)]. Phase-resolved Fourier analysis reveals directly that the modulations in the Ox(r) and Oy(r) sublattice images consistently exhibit a relative phase of π. We confirm this discovery on two highly distinct cuprate compounds, ruling out tunnel matrix-element and materials-specific systematics. These observations demonstrate by direct sublattice phase-resolved visualization that the density wave found in underdoped cuprates consists of modulations of the intraunit-cell states that exhibit a predominantly d-symmetry form factor.