Pinning of stripes by local structural distortions in cuprate high-Tc superconductors

TL;DR

This paper investigates how local structural distortions in cuprate superconductors influence stripe formation and local electronic properties, providing insights into the interplay between lattice symmetry and electronic order.

Contribution

It introduces a mean-field model showing how local LTT regions pin stripe order and simulates tunneling data to connect structural distortions with electronic modulations.

Findings

Local LTT regions act as pinning centers for stripe order.

Coherence peaks and van Hove singularity are spatially modulated.

Simulation matches recent tunneling experiments in overdoped cuprates.

Abstract

We study the spin-density wave (stripe) instability in lattices with mixed low-temperature orthorhombic (LTO) and low-temperature tetragonal (LTT) crystal symmetry. Within an explicit mean-field model it is shown how local LTT regions act as pinning centers for static stripe formation. We calculate the modulations in the local density of states near these local stripe regions and find that mainly the coherence peaks and the van Hove singularity (VHS) are spatially modulated. Lastly, we use the real-space approach to simulate recent tunneling data in the overdoped regime where the VHS has been detected by utilizing local normal state regions.