Influence of non-magnetic impurities on hole doped two-leg Cu-O Hubbard ladders

TL;DR

This paper investigates how non-magnetic impurities affect the phase diagram and local properties of hole-doped two-leg Cu-O Hubbard ladders, revealing impurity-induced instabilities and providing analytical tools for experimental predictions.

Contribution

It extends boundary conformal field theory to ladder systems with impurities and analyzes the interplay of disorder and interactions at different doping levels.

Findings

Impurities induce intraband or interband instabilities depending on doping.

Exact analytical expressions for correlation functions are derived.

Predictions for NMR and STM measurements are provided.

Abstract

We study the influence of non magnetic impurities on the phase diagram of doped two-leg Hubbard Cu-O ladders. In the absence of impurities this system posseses d-wave superconducting states and orbital current states depending on the doping. A single, strong, scatterer modifies its environment locally and this effect is assessed using a renormalization group analysis. At high doping, disorder causes intraband instabilities and at low doping it promotes interband instabilities. In the former case, we extend the boundary conformal field theory method, developed in the context of single chains, to handle the ladder problem, and we find exact closed-form analytical expressions for the correlation functions. This allows us to compute experimentally measurable local quantities such as the nuclear magnetic resonance line broadenings and scanning tunnelling microscope profiles. We also discuss the low doping regime where Kondo physics is at play, making qualitative predictions about its nature. Insight into collective effects is also given in the many weak impurities case, based on an RG approach. In this regime, one sees the interplay between interactions and disorder. We emphasize the influence of the O atoms on disorder effects both for the single- and for the many-defect situations.