Pseudogap and Fermi surface in the presence of a spin-vortex checkerboard for 1/8-doped lanthanum cuprates

Abstract

Lanthanum family of high-temperature cuprate superconductors is known to exhibit both spin and charge electronic modulations around doping level 1/8. We assume that these modulations have the character of two-dimensional spin-vortex checkerboard and investigate whether this assumption is consistent with the Fermi surface and the pseudogap measured by angle-resolved photo-emission spectroscopy. We also explore the possibility of observing quantum oscillations of transport coefficients in such a background. These investigations are based on a model of non-interacting spin-1/2 fermions hopping on a square lattice and coupled through spins to a magnetic field imitating spin-vortex checkerboard. The main results of this article include (i) calculation of Fermi surface containing Fermi arcs at the positions in the Brillouin zone largely consistent with experiments; (ii) identification of factors complicating the observations of quantum oscillations in the presence of spin modulations; and (iii) investigation of the symmetries of the resulting electronic energy bands, which, in particular, indicates that each band is double-degenerate and, in addition, has at least one conical point, where it touches another double-degenerate band. We discuss possible implications these cones may have for the transport properties and the pseudogap.

Single-domain stripe order in a high-temperature superconductor

“…The peaks may be interpreted as the signature of either two orthogonal magnetic domains in the wellknown stripe model 1,2,6,[25][26][27][28][29] shown in Fig. 1a, or to two phaserelated wavevectors describing a single-domain multi-Q magnetic order, which is consistent with the interpretation of earlier experimental results [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] . The incommensurability δ SDW is doping dependent with δ SDW % 0:12 rlu around x = 1/8 1 .…”

Single domain stripe order in a high-temperature superconductor

“…They may be interpreted as the signature of either two orthogonal magnetic domains in the well-known stripe model 1,2,6,[25][26][27][28][29] shown in Fig. 1a, or to two phase-related wavevectors describing a single-domain multi-Q SDW or-der, which is consistent with the interpretation of earlier experimental results [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] . The incommensurability δ SDW is doping dependent with δ SDW ≈ 0.12 rlu around x = 1/8 1 .…”

“…Thus, our results provide direct experimental evidence for a single-Q magnetic structure in LSCO, and that application of pressure along one of the Cu-O directions favors the domain characterized by a propagation vector along the perpendicular Cu-O direction. We note that this effectively rules out spin-vortex checkerboard structures and any other multi-Q singledomain structures proposed earlier [29][30][31][32][33]35,37,39 .…”

Optically-induced Umklapp shift currents in striped cuprates

“…[39]; in this work, we aim to understand the electrodynamics of striped systems from the generic perspective of lattice symmetries rather than to match a specific model of high-temperature superconductors. Let us remark that while below we investigate stripe patterns, our framework can be equally applied to analyze checkerboards [32,[40][41][42][43][44][45][46]. We write the CDW part of the Hamiltonian as ĤCDW = Ĥb + Ĥs , where Ĥb and Ĥs encode bond-centered and site-centered modulations [see Fig.…”