Single-particle spectrum in the electron-doped cuprates

Momentum-resolved visualization of electronic evolution in doping a Mott insulator

High temperature superconductivity in cuprates arises from doping a parent Mott insulator by electrons or holes. A central issue is how the Mott gap evolves and the low-energy states emerge with doping. Here we report angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements on a cuprate parent compound by sequential in situ electron doping. The chemical potential jumps to the bottom of the upper Hubbard band upon a slight electron doping, making it possible to directly visualize the charge transfer band and the full Mott gap region. With increasing doping, the Mott gap rapidly collapses due to the spectral weight transfer from the charge transfer band to the gapped region and the induced low-energy states emerge in a wide energy range inside the Mott gap. These results provide key information on the electronic evolution in doping a Mott insulator and establish a basis for developing microscopic theories for cuprate superconductivity.

How a Mott insulating state evolves into a conducting or superconducting state is a central issue in doping a Mott insulator and important to understand the physics in high temperature cuprate superconductors. Here, the authors visualize the electronic structure evolution of a Mott insulator within the full Mott gap region and address the fundamental issues.

Characteristics of the Mott transition and electronic states of high-temperature cuprate superconductors from the perspective of the Hubbard model

A fundamental issue of the Mott transition is how electrons behaving as single particles carrying spin and charge in a metal change into those exhibiting separated spin and charge excitations (low-energy spin excitation and high-energy charge excitation) in a Mott insulator. This issue has attracted considerable attention particularly in relation to high-temperature cuprate superconductors, which exhibit electronic states near the Mott transition that are difficult to explain in conventional pictures. Here, from a new viewpoint of the Mott transition based on analyses of the Hubbard model, we review anomalous features observed in high-temperature cuprate superconductors near the Mott transition.

Visualizing the atomic-scale electronic structure of the Ca2CuO2Cl2 Mott insulator

Although the mechanism of superconductivity in the cuprates remains elusive, it is generally agreed that at the heart of the problem is the physics of doped Mott insulators. A crucial step for solving the high temperature superconductivity puzzle is to elucidate the electronic structure of the parent compound and the behaviour of doped charge carriers. Here we use scanning tunnelling microscopy to investigate the atomic-scale electronic structure of the Ca(2)CuO(2)Cl(2) parent Mott insulator of the cuprates. The full electronic spectrum across the Mott-Hubbard gap is uncovered for the first time, which reveals the particle-hole symmetric and spatially uniform Hubbard bands. Defect-induced charge carriers are found to create broad in-gap electronic states that are strongly localized in space. We show that the electronic structure of pristine Mott insulator is consistent with the Zhang-Rice singlet model, but the peculiar features of the doped electronic states require further investigations.

Fluctuation-exchange study of antiferromagnetism in disordered electron-doped cuprate superconductors

On the basis of the Hubbard model, we extend the fluctuation-exchange (FLEX) approach to investigating the properties of the antiferromagnetic (AF) phase in electron-doped cuprate superconductors. Furthermore, by incorporating the effect of scatterings due to the disordered dopant atoms into the FLEX formalism, our numerical results show that the antiferromagnetic transition temperature, the onset temperature of pseudogap due to spin fluctuations, the spectral density of the single particle near the Fermi surface, and the staggered magnetization in the AF phase as a function of electron doping can consistently account for the experimental measurements.

Dynamical breakup of the fermi surface in a doped Mott insulator

The evolution from an anomalous metallic phase to a Mott insulator within the two-dimensional Hubbard model is investigated by means of the cellular dynamical mean-field theory. We show that approaching the density-driven Mott metal-insulator transition the Fermi surface is strongly renormalized and the quasiparticle description breaks down in a very anisotropic fashion. Regions where the quasiparticles are strongly scattered (hot spots) and regions where the scattering rate is relatively weak (cold spot) form irrespective of whether the parent insulator has antiferromagnetic long-range order, while their location is not universal and is determined by the interplay of the renormalization of the scattering rate and the Fermi surface shape.

Competition between antiferromagnetism and superconductivity in high-Tc cuprates

Using variational cluster perturbation theory we study the competition between d-wave superconductivity (dSC) and antiferromagnetism (AF) in the t-t(')-t('')-U Hubbard model. Large scale computer calculations reproduce the overall ground-state phase diagram of the high-temperature superconductors as well as the one-particle excitation spectra for both hole and electron doping. We identify clear signatures of the Mott gap as well as of AF and of dSC that should be observable in photoemission experiments.

Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy of the antiferromagnetic superconductor Nd1.87Ce0.13CuO4: anisotropic spin-correlation gap, pseudogap, and the induced quasiparticle mass enhancement

We performed high-resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy on Nd1.87Ce0.13CuO4, which is located at the boundary of the antiferromagnetic (AF) and the superconducting phase. We observed that the quasiparticle (QP) effective mass around (pi,0) is strongly enhanced due to the opening of the AF gap. The QP mass and the AF gap are found to be anisotropic, with the largest value near the intersecting point of the Fermi surface and the AF zone boundary. In addition, we observed that the QP peak disappears around the Néel temperature (TN) while the AF pseudogap is gradually filled up at much higher temperatures, possibly due to the short-range AF correlation.

Pseudogap and spin fluctuations in the normal state of the electron-doped cuprates

We present reliable many-body calculations for the t-t(')-t('')-U Hubbard model that explain in detail the results of recent angle-resolved photoemission experiments on electron-doped high-temperature superconductors. The origin of the pseudogap is traced to two-dimensional antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations whose calculated temperature-dependent correlation length also agrees with recent neutron scattering measurements. We make specific predictions for photoemission, for neutron scattering, and for the phase diagram.

Hot spots and pseudogaps for hole- and electron-doped high-temperature superconductors

Using cluster perturbation theory, it is shown that the spectral weight and pseudogap observed at the Fermi energy in recent angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy of both electron- and hole-doped high-temperature superconductors find their natural explanation within the t-t(')-t(")-U Hubbard model in two dimensions. The value of the interaction U needed to explain the experiments for electron-doped systems at optimal doping is in the weak to intermediate coupling regime where the t-J model is inappropriate. At strong coupling, short-range correlations suffice to create a pseudogap, but at weak-coupling long correlation lengths associated with the antiferromagnetic wave vector are necessary.