Bond Order in Two-Dimensional Metals with Antiferromagnetic Exchange Interactions

Abstract

We present an unrestricted Hartree-Fock computation of charge-ordering instabilities of two-dimensional metals with antiferromagnetic exchange interactions, allowing for arbitrary ordering wave vectors and internal wave functions of the particle-hole pair condensate. We find that the ordering has a dominant d symmetry of rotations about lattice points for a range of ordering wave vectors, including those observed in recent experiments at low temperatures on YBa2Cu3Oy. This d symmetry implies the charge ordering is primarily on the bonds of the Cu lattice, and we propose incommensurate bond order parameters for the underdoped cuprates. The field theory for the onset of Néel order in a metal has an emergent pseudospin symmetry which “rotates” d-wave Cooper pairs to particle-hole pairs [M. A. Metlitski and S. Sachdev, Phys. Rev. B 82, 075128 (2010)]; our results show that this symmetry has consequences even when the spin correlations are short ranged and incommensurate.