The One-Particle Spectral Function and the Local Density of States in a Phenomenological Mixed-Phase Model for High-Temperature Superconductors

TL;DR

This paper investigates a phenomenological model for high-temperature superconductors, showing that including disorder and phase separation reproduces key experimental spectral features and the pseudogap observed in underdoped cuprates.

Contribution

It demonstrates that a mixed-phase model with disorder can replicate experimental spectral features and the pseudogap in underdoped high-Tc superconductors.

Findings

Disorder-induced phase separation reproduces two-branch spectra.

Pseudogap arises from mixture of antiferromagnetic and superconducting regions.

Local DOS aligns with tunneling experiment observations.

Abstract

The dynamical properties of a recently introduced phenomenological model for high temperature superconductors are investigated. In the clean limit, it was observed that none of the homogeneous or striped states that are induced by the model at low temperatures can reproduce the recent angle-resolved photoemission results for LSCO (Yoshida et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 027001 (2003)), that show a signal with two branches in the underdoped regime. On the other hand, upon including quenched disorder in the model and breaking the homogeneous state into ``patches'' that are locally either superconducting or antiferromagnetic, the two-branch spectra can be reproduced. In this picture, the nodal regions are caused by d-wave superconducting clusters. Studying the density of states (DOS), a pseudogap is observed, caused by the mixture of the gapped antiferromagnetic state and a d-wave superconductor. The local DOS can be interpreted using a mixed-phase picture, similarly as observed in tunneling experiments. It is concluded that a simple phenomenological model for cuprates can capture many of the features observed in the underdoped regime of these materials.