Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy of the cuprate superconductors

TL;DR

This review summarizes recent ARPES findings on cuprate superconductors, focusing on their electronic structure, pseudogap, and many-body effects, providing an updated overview of experimental insights into high-temperature superconductivity.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive synthesis of recent ARPES results on cuprates, highlighting new understandings of their low-energy electronic properties and the role of many-body interactions.

Findings

Identification of Fermi surface and pseudogap features

Observation of coherent quasiparticles emerging below Tc

Evidence of electronic inhomogeneity and phase separation

Abstract

This paper reviews the most recent ARPES results on the cuprate superconductors and their insulating parent and sister compounds, with the purpose of providing an updated summary of the extensive literature in this field. The low energy excitations are discussed with emphasis on some of the most relevant issues, such as the Fermi surface and remnant Fermi surface, the superconducting gap, the pseudogap and d-wave-like dispersion, evidence of electronic inhomogeneity and nano-scale phase separation, the emergence of coherent quasiparticles through the superconducting transition, and many-body effects in the one-particle spectral function due to the interaction of the charge with magnetic and/or lattice degrees of freedom. The first part of the paper introduces photoemission spectroscopy in the context of strongly interacting systems, along with an update on the state-of-the-art instrumentation. The second part provides a brief overview of the scientific issues relevant to the investigation of the low energy electronic structure by ARPES. The rest of the paper is devoted to the review of experimental results from the cuprates and the discussion is organized along conceptual lines: normal-state electronic structure, interlayer interaction, superconducting gap, coherent superconducting peak, pseudogap, electron self energy and collective modes. Within each topic, ARPES data from the various copper oxides are presented.