The short-range correlations of a doped Mott insulator

We study the single hole tt't''J-model numerically to address the momentum space anisotropy found in doped Mott insulators. A simple two band picture to understand how the doped hole is screened by the spin background in states of different momenta is proposed. In this picture, the disparity between the nodal and antinodal regions, observed by experiments in the underdoped cuprate superconductors, follows from local energetic considerations and amounts to the distinction betw...

We demonstrate that a Mott insulator lightly doped with holes is still an insulator at low temperature even without disorder. Hole localization obtains because the chemical potential lies in a pseudogap which has a vanishing density of states at zero temperature. The energy scale for the pseudogap is set by the nearest-neighbour singlet-triplet splitting. As this energy scale vanishes if transitions, virtual or otherwise, to the upper Hubbard band are not permitted, the funda...

A detailed exact-diagonalization study is made for the doping dependence of the single-particle spectral function $A({\bf k},\omega)$ and momentum distribution function $n({\bf k})$ of the two-dimensional $t$$-$$J$ model as a representative model for doped Mott insulators. The results for $A({\bf k},\omega)$ show unambiguously that the rigid-band behavior is realized in the small-cluster $t$$-$$J$ model: upon doping, the uppermost states of the quasiparticle band observed at ...

The fate of an injected hole in a Mott antiferromagnet is an outstanding issue of strongly correlated physics. It provides important insights into doped Mott insulators closely related to high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates. Here, we report a systematic numerical study based on the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG). It reveals a remarkable novelty and surprise for the single hole's motion in otherwise well-understood Mott insulators. Specifically, we find...

We show that the strong coupling physics inherent to the insulating Mott state in 2D leads to a jump in the chemical potential upon doping and the emergence of a pseudogap in the single particle spectrum below a characteristic temperature. The pseudogap arises because any singly-occupied site not immediately neighbouring a hole experiences a maximum energy barrier for transport equal to $t^2/U$, where $t$ is the nearest-neighbour hopping integral and $U$ the on-site repulsion...

In the generalized-tJ model the effect of the large local Coulomb repulsion is accounted for by restricting the Hilbert space to states with at most one electron per site. In this case the electronic system can be viewed in terms of holes hopping in a lattice of correlated spins, where holes are the carriers doped into the half-filled Mott insulator. To explicitly capture the interplay between the hole dynamics and local spin correlations we derive a new formulation of the ge...

We show that lightly doped holes will be self-trapped in an antiferromagnetic spin background at low-temperatures, resulting in a spontaneous translational symmetry breaking. The underlying Mott physics is responsible for such novel self-localization of charge carriers. Interesting transport and dielectric properties are found as the consequences, including large doping-dependent thermopower and dielectric constant, low-temperature variable-range-hopping resistivity, as well ...

Trial wavefunctions, constructed explicitly from the unique 2-dimensional Mott insulating state with antiferromagnetic order, are proposed to describe the low-energy states of a Mott insulator slightly doped with holes or electrons. With the state behaving like charged quasi-particles with well-defined momenta, a rigid band is observed. These states have much less pairing correlations than previously studied ones. Small Fermi patches obtained are consistent with recent experi...

We study a ground-state ansatz for the single-hole doped $t$-$J$ model in two dimensions via a variational Monte Carlo (VMC) method. Such a single-hole wave function possesses finite angular momenta generated by hidden spin currents, which give rise to a novel ground state degeneracy in agreement with recent exact diagonalization (ED) and density matrix renormalization group (DMGR) results. We further show that the wave function can be decomposed into a quasiparticle componen...

The numerically exact diagonalization study on small clusters of the t-J model with the second- and third- neighbor hopping terms shows that a novel spin liquid state is realized around a doped hole with momentum k=(pi,0) and energy \sim 2J compared with that with (pi/2,pi/2) in insulating cuprates, where the spin and charge degrees of freedom are approximately decoupled. Our finding implies that the excitations in the insulating cuprates are mapped onto the the d-wave resona...