Comment on "High-Spin Polaron in Lightly Doped CuO$_2$ Planes"

TL;DR

This paper comments on a recent study about high-spin polarons in cuprate planes, clarifying that similar solutions were previously reported in earlier work and emphasizing the importance of prior findings.

Contribution

It highlights that the high-spin polaron solutions claimed as novel were actually identified in earlier research, correcting the record on the novelty of these results.

Findings

High-spin polaron solutions exist in prior models.

Features described by Lau et al. are present in earlier work.

The importance of acknowledging previous research in the field.

Abstract

In a recent Letter (Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 036401 (2011)), Lau, et al. investigated the single hole problem in an effective model containing Cu $d$ and O $2p$ orbitals by exact diagonalization on clusters composed of 32 CuO$_2$ unit cells. With full quantum fluctuations due to the antiferromagnetic (AFM) backgroud, they found that spin-polaron solutions with spin 3/2 become lowest energy solutions in certain region of Brillouin zone (BZ), which they claimed no similiar solutions were obtained in other models or approximations before. In this Comment, we would like to point out that such high-spin polaron solutions have been found in our previous Letter (Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 057001, (2003)) and many of features described by Lau et al. have in fact been seen in our Letter.