We construct the low-energy theory of a doped Mott insulator, such as the high-temperature superconductors, by explicitly integrating over the degrees of freedom far away from the chemical potential. For either hole or electron doping, a charge 2e bosonic field emerges at low energy. The charge 2e boson mediates dynamical spectral weight transfer across the Mott gap and creates a new charge e excitation by binding a hole. The result is a bifurcation of the electron dispersion below the chemical potential as observed recently in angle-resolved photoemission on Pb-doped Bi 2 Sr 2 CaCu 2 O 8 (Pb2212). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.99.046404 PACS numbers: 71.27.+a Two problems beset the construction of a proper lowenergy theory (explicit integration of the high-energy scale) of doped Mott insulators. First, the high-energy degrees of freedom are neither fermionic nor bosonic. To illustrate, in a Mott insulator, the chemical potential lies in a charge gap between two bands that represent electron motion on empty (lower Hubbard band, LHB for short) and singly occupied sites (upper Hubbard band, hereafter UHB). Since the latter involves double occupancy, the gap between the bands is set by the on-site repulsion energy U. Nonetheless, both double occupancy and double holes represent high-energy excitations in the half-filled insulating state as each is equally far from the chemical potential. As neither of these is fermionic, standard fermionic path integral procedures are of no use.Second, unlike the static bands in band insulators, the UHB and LHB are not rigid, thereby permitting spectral weight transfer. When x holes are placed in a Mott insulator, at least 2x [1] single particle addition states are created just above the chemical potential. The deviation from x, as would be the case in a band insulator, is intrinsic to the strong correlations that mediate the Mott insulating state in a half-filled band, thereby distinguishing Mottness from ordering. The states in excess of x arise from two distinct effects. Each hole reduces the number of ways of creating a doubly occupied site by one, thereby reducing the spectral weight at high energy. As the x empty sites can be occupied by either spin up or spin down electrons, the 2x sum rule is exact [1] in the atomic limit. Further, in the presence of hybridization (with matrix element t), virtual excitations between the LHB and UHB increase the loss of spectral weight at high energy thereby leading to a faster than 2x growth [1-3] of the low-energy spectral weight, a phenomenon confirmed [4 -6] widely in the high-temperature copper-oxide superconductors.Because some of the low-energy degrees of freedom of doped Mott insulators derive from the high-energy scale, low-energy descriptions must either (C1) abandon Fermi statistics or (C2) generate new degrees of freedom [1] which ultimately leads to electron number nonconservation. Current proposals for the low-energy physics of doped Mott insulators are based either on perturbation theory [7] followed by projecting out the high...