Bosonic resonating valence bond wave function for doped Mott insulators

TL;DR

This paper introduces a bosonic RVB wave function for doped Mott insulators, capturing pseudogap phenomena and proposing a route to d-wave superconductivity, unifying key phases in high-Tc cuprates.

Contribution

It develops a new bosonic RVB framework for doped Mott insulators, linking pseudogap behavior with superconductivity and antiferromagnetism.

Findings

RVB pairing size decreases with doping

Twisted holes exhibit off-diagonal long-range order

A d-wave superconducting state is derived

Abstract

We propose a new class of ground states for doped Mott insulators in the electron second-quantization representation. They are obtained from a bosonic resonating valence bond (RVB) theory of the t-J model. At half filling, the ground state describes spin correlations of the S=1/2 Heisenberg model very accurately. Its spin degrees of freedom are characterized by RVB pairing of spins, the size of which decreases continuously as holes are doped into the system. Charge degrees of freedom emerge upon doping and are described by twisted holes in the RVB background. We show that the twisted holes exhibit an off diagonal long range order (ODLRO) in the pseudogap ground state, which has a finite pairing amplitude, but is short of phase coherence. Unpaired spins in such a pseudogap ground state behave as free vortices, preventing superconducting phase coherence. The existence of nodal quasiparticles is also ensured by such a hidden ODLRO in the ground state, which is non-Fermi-liquid-like in the absence of superconducting phase coherence. Two distinct types of spin excitations can also be constructed. The superconducting instability of the pseudogap ground state is discussed and a d-wave superconducting ground state is obtained. This class of pseudogap and superconducting ground states unifies antiferromagnetism, pseudogap, superconductivity, and Mott physics into a new state of matter.