Electronic structure in underdoped cuprates due to the emergence of a pseudogap

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the electronic structure of underdoped cuprates near the pseudogap transition, revealing Fermi surface reconstruction and effective mass divergence using a phenomenological Green's function model.

Contribution

It applies the Yang-Rice-Zhang Green's function to describe Fermi surface changes and quasiparticle properties in the underdoped cuprates near the pseudogap onset.

Findings

Identification of Luttinger hole and electron pockets in the Fermi surface

Observation of strong effective mass renormalization near the pocket edges

Signatures of Fermi surface reconstruction from large Fermi contours

Abstract

The phenomenological Green's function developed in the works of Yang, Rice and Zhang has been very successful in understanding many of the anomalous superconducting properties of the deeply underdoped cuprates. It is based on considerations of the resonating valence bond spin liquid approximation and is designed to describe the underdoped regime of the cuprates. Here we emphasize the region of doping, $x$, just below the quantum critical point at which the pseudogap develops. In addition to Luttinger hole pockets centered around the nodal direction, there are electron pockets near the antinodes which are connected to the hole pockets by gapped bridging contours. We determine the contours of nearest approach as would be measured in angular resolved photoemission experiments and emphasize signatures of the Fermi surface reconstruction from the large Fermi contour of Fermi liquid theory (which contains $1+x$ hole states) to the Luttinger pocket (which contains $x$ hole states). We find that the quasiparticle effective mass renormalization increases strongly towards the edge of the Luttinger pockets beyond which it diverges.