Spin and charge order in the vortex lattice of the cuprates: experiment and theory

TL;DR

This paper reviews experimental and theoretical findings on spin and charge order phenomena near magnetic quantum phase transitions in cuprate superconductors, highlighting a unified framework for understanding their complex phase behavior.

Contribution

It offers a semi-quantitative theoretical model that explains diverse experimental observations across different cuprate materials with a single doping-dependent parameter.

Findings

Charge order nucleates around vortices in overdoped cuprates.

Magnetic field influences static spin order in underdoped cuprates.

A unified theory describes competing orders in all cuprates.

Abstract

I summarize recent results, obtained with E. Demler, K. Park, A. Polkovnikov, M. Vojta, and Y. Zhang, on spin and charge correlations near a magnetic quantum phase transition in the cuprates. STM experiments on slightly overdoped BSCCO (J.E. Hoffman et al., Science 295, 466 (2002)) are consistent with the nucleation of static charge order coexisting with dynamic spin correlations around vortices, and neutron scattering experiments have measured the magnetic field dependence of static spin order in the underdoped regime in LSCO (B. Lake et al., Nature 415, 299 (2002)) and LaCuO_4+y (B. Khaykovich et al., Phys. Rev. B 66, 014528 (2002)). Our predictions provide a semi-quantitative description of these observations, with only a single parameter measuring distance from the quantum critical point changing with doping level. These results suggest that a common theory of competing spin, charge and superconducting orders provides a unified description of all the cuprates.