Why Matthiessen's rule is violated in the high-$T_{c}$ cuprate superconductors?

TL;DR

This paper explains the violation of Matthiessen's rule in high-$T_c$ cuprates by showing that antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations suppress electron-phonon coupling, affecting resistivity and spectral features in the strange metal phase.

Contribution

It demonstrates that vertex corrections from antiferromagnetic fluctuations weaken electron-phonon interactions, providing a new understanding of resistivity behavior in cuprate superconductors.

Findings

Electron-phonon coupling to the $B_{1g}$ mode is suppressed by spin fluctuation vertex corrections.

Destructive interference from antiferromagnetic correlations reduces electron hopping and coupling.

The suppression of electron-phonon coupling explains the violation of Matthiessen's rule.

Abstract

The perfect linear-in-$T$ dc resistivity in the strange metal phase of the high-$T_{c}$ cuprate superconductors is probably the most prominent manifestation of their non-Fermi liquid nature. A major puzzle about the strange metal behavior is that there is no discernible change in the trend of the dc resistivity at a temperature when we expect the electron-phonon coupling to play an essential role. The empirical Matthiessen's rule of summation of the resistivity from different scattering channels seems to be simply violated. On the other hand, the electron-phonon coupling has long been proposed to be responsible for the various spectral anomalies observed in the cuprate superconductors. In particular, the $B_{1g}$ buckling mode of the oxygen ion in the $CuO_{2}$ plane is proposed to be responsible for the peak-dip-hump spectral shape around the anti-nodal point. Here we show that the coupling to the $B_{1g}$ buckling mode is strongly suppressed by the vertex correction from the antiferromagnetic spin fluctuation in the system as a result of the destructive interference between electron-phonon matrix element at momentum differ by the antiferromagnetic wave vector. In the real space scenario, such a destructive interference effect simply amounts to the fact that the electron hopping between nearest-neighboring sites is suppressed by the antiferromagnetic spin correlation between the electrons. More generally, we argue that the electron-phonon coupling strength in the cuprate superconductors should diminish with the proximity of the Mott insulating phase as a result of similar vertex correction from the electron correlation effect. We think that this offers an interpretation for the violation of the Matthiessen's rule in the dc resistivity of the strange metal phase of the cuprate superconductors.