Interplay between incommensurate phases in the cuprates

TL;DR

This study uses a slave-boson approach to analyze incommensurate phases in cuprates, revealing how doping influences stripe behavior, incommensurability, and phase transitions, aligning with experimental observations.

Contribution

It provides a systematic theoretical analysis of stripe phases in cuprates considering next-nearest neighbor hopping effects, highlighting the impact on phase stability and incommensurability.

Findings

Qualitative agreement with experimental data for doping x ≤ 1/8.

t' modifies optimal stripe filling and induces a crossover to diagonal spiral phase.

Diagonal spiral phase stabilized at doping around 0.09 for t' = -0.3t.

Abstract

We establish the qualitative behavior of the incommensurability $\epsilon$, optimal domain wall filling $\nu$ and chemical potential $\mu$ for increasing doping by a systematic slave-boson study of an array of vertical stripes separated by up to $d=11$ lattice constants. Our findings obtained in the Hubbard model with the next-nearest neighbor hopping $t'=-0.15t$ agree qualitatively with the experimental data for the cuprates in the doping regime $x\lesssim 1/8$. It is found that $t'$ modifies the optimal filling $\nu$ and triggers the crossover to the diagonal (1,1) spiral phase at increasing doping, stabilized already at $x\simeq 0.09$ for $t'=-0.3t$.