Quantum oscillations in the hole-doped cuprates and the confinement of spinons

TL;DR

This paper investigates the Fermi surface reconstructions in underdoped cuprates, proposing that the confinement of spinons during a transition from a fractionalized Fermi liquid to a charge density wave state explains the absence of certain predicted quantum oscillation frequencies.

Contribution

It introduces a model describing a transition from a fractionalized Fermi liquid to a charge density wave state, explaining the suppression of unobserved quantum oscillation frequencies in cuprates.

Findings

Confinement of spinons can eliminate unobserved oscillation frequencies.

Transition from FL* to charge density wave state affects Fermi surface topology.

Model aligns with experimental observations of quantum oscillations in cuprates.

Abstract

A long standing problem in the study of the under-hole-doped cuprates has been the description of the Fermi surfaces underlying the high magnetic field quantum oscillations, and their connection to the higher temperature pseudogap metal. Harrison and Sebastian (arXiv:1103.4181) proposed that the pseudogap `Fermi arcs' are reconstructed into an electron pocket by field-induced charge density wave order. But computations on such a model (Zhang and Mei, arXiv:1411.2098) show an unobserved additional oscillation frequency from a Fermi surface arising from the backsides of the hole pockets completing the Fermi arcs. We describe a transition from a fractionalized Fermi liquid (FL*) model of the pseudogap metal, to a metal with bi-directional charge density wave order without fractionalization. We show that the confinement of the fermionic spinon excitations of the FL* across this transition can eliminate the unobserved oscillation frequency.