A Phenomenological Theory of the Anomalous Pseudogap Phase in Underdoped Cuprates

TL;DR

This paper reviews a phenomenological theory explaining the pseudogap phase in underdoped cuprates, connecting experimental observations with a model inspired by Mott localization, and discusses implications for microscopic theories.

Contribution

It presents a phenomenological ansatz that successfully describes experimental data and discusses its relation to microscopic strongly coupled Hamiltonian theories.

Findings

The ansatz explains various spectroscopic experiments.

It highlights the connection between pseudogap phenomena and Mott localization.

Implications for microscopic theories are explored.

Abstract

The theoretical description of the anomalous properties of the pseudogap phase in the underdoped region of the cuprate phase diagram lags behind the progress in spectroscopic and other experiments. A phenomenological ansatz, based on analogies to the approach to Mott localization at weak coupling in lower dimensional systems, has been proposed by Yang, Rice and Zhang [Phys. Rev. B 73 (2006),174501]. This ansatz has had success in describing a range of experiments. The motivation underlying this ansatz is described and the comparisons to experiment are reviewed. Implications for a more microscopic theory are discussed together with the relation to theories that start directly from microscopic strongly coupled Hamiltonians.