"Waterfalls" phenomenon in superconducting cuprates

TL;DR

The paper clarifies that the 'waterfalls' observed in ARPES studies of high-temperature superconductors are due to intensity suppression effects, not a new energy scale or quasiparticle phenomena, and discusses the spectrum's components.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the waterfalls are caused by intensity suppression, not a new physical phenomenon, and identifies two components in the photoemission spectrum.

Findings

Waterfalls result from intensity suppression along BZ diagonals.

High-energy scale (~0.25 eV) is due to bosonic coupling, not waterfalls.

Spectrum comprises one-particle excitations and an unknown grid-like component.

Abstract

We show that the "waterfalls", as reported in recent ARPES studies on HTSC, can neither be described as a part of a self-consistent quasiparticle spectrum nor represent a new physical phenomena, namely the "new energy scale". They stem from the critical suppression of the photoemission intensity along the Brillouin zone (BZ) diagonals. Our arguments, however, do not question the existence of the high-energy scale itself (~ 0.25 eV), which is a simple consequence of the renormalization maximum and has been explained earlier in terms of coupling to a continuum of bosonic excitations. Moreover, when the matrix-elements are taken into account, it becomes clear that the photoemission spectrum consists of two components: one represents the spectrum of one-particle excitations and the other, having a grid-like structure along the bonding directions in the BZ, is of yet unknown origin.