Abstract
Recent experimental discoveries have brought a diverse set of broken symmetry states to the center stage of research on cuprate superconductors. Here, we focus on a thematic understanding of the diverse phenomenology by exploring a strong-coupling mechanism of symmetry breaking driven by frustration of antiferromagnetic (AFM) order. We achieve this through a variational study of a three-band model of the CuO2 plane with Kondo type exchange couplings between doped oxygen holes and classical copper spins. Two main findings from this strong-coupling multi-band perspective are (1) that the symmetry hierarchy of spin stripe, charge stripe, intra-unit-cell nematic order and isotropic phases are all accessible microscopically within the model, (2) many symmetry-breaking patterns compete with energy differences within a few meV per Cu atom to produce a rich phase diagram. These results indicate that the diverse phenomenology of broken-symmetry states in hole-doped AFM charge-transfer insulators may indeed arise from hole-doped frustration of antiferromagnetism.
Highlights
Translational-symmetry breaking in hole-doped La-based nickelates and cuprates in the form of static spin and charge stripes has been well established for almost two decades [1,2,3,4]
The recent surge of experimental discoveries reporting spin or charge order in all families of hole-doped cuprates [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21] and even in some Fe-based superconductors [22] has brought the diverse phenomenology of broken-symmetry states to the forefront of study of high-Tc superconductors
We considered a three-orbital model for underdoped cuprates, which incorporates strong-coupling physics through singly occupied Cu-sites hosting local moments and reflects the charge-transfer energy through constraining holes to live on the oxygen sites
Summary
Translational-symmetry breaking in hole-doped La-based nickelates and cuprates in the form of static spin and charge stripes has been well established for almost two decades [1,2,3,4]. We consider a simplified model which ignores the charge fluctuation on the transition metal sites and treat the spins on those sites as classical local moments that interact with doped itinerant holes living on the oxygen sites through a Kondo type coupling (see figure 1). We note that our values for the parameters in the effective Hamiltonian for doped holes differ slightly from those used in previous work [49, 53, 54]—the values we use should be viewed as effective couplings given our assumption of a classical copper spin They place the regime of interest in the strong coupling limit, since ta + tb and J2 are much greater than the free fermion bandwidth set by |ta − tb | ∼ tpp and motivate the use of a variational approach as discussed in the and following sections
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