Critical charge instability on the verge of the Mott transition and the origin of quantum protection in high-Tccuprates

Abstract

The concept of topological excitations and the related ground state degeneracy are employed to establish an effective theory of the superconducting state evolving from the Mott insulator for high-${T}_{c}$ cuprates. The theory includes the effects of the relevant energy scales with the emphasis on the Coulomb interaction $U$ governed by the electromagnetic U(1) compact group. The results are obtained for the layered $t\ensuremath{-}{t}^{\ensuremath{'}}\ensuremath{-}{t}_{\ensuremath{\perp}}\ensuremath{-}U\ensuremath{-}J$ system of strongly correlated electrons relevant for cuprates. Casting the Coulomb interaction in terms of composite-fermions via the gauge flux attachment facility, we show that instanton events in the Matsubara ``imaginary time,'' labeled by topological winding numbers, are essential configurations of the phase field dual to the charge. This provides a nonperturbative concept of the topological quantization and displays the significance of discrete topological sectors in the theory governed by the global characteristics of the phase field. We show that for topologically ordered states these quantum numbers play the role of an order parameter in a way similar to the Landau order parameter for conventionally ordered states. In analogy to the usual phase transition that is characterized by a sudden change of the symmetry, the topological phase transitions are governed by a discontinuous change of the topological numbers signaled by the divergence of the zero-temperature topological susceptibility. This defines a quantum criticality ruled by topologically conserved numbers rather than the Landau principle of the symmetry breaking. We show that in the limit of strong correlations topological charge is linked to the average electronic filling number and the topological susceptibility to the electronic compressibility of the system. We exploit the impact of these nontrivial U(1) instanton phase field configurations for the cuprate phase diagram which displays the ``hidden'' quantum critical point covered by the superconducting lobe in addition to a sharp crossover between a compressible normal ``strange metal'' state and a region characterized by a vanishing compressibility, which marks the Mott insulator. Finally, we argue that the existence of robust quantum numbers explains the stability against small perturbation of the system and attributes to the topological ``quantum protectorate'' as observed in strongly correlated systems.