arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to R. B. Laughlin.
I argue that the ``gap'' recently observed at the Brillouin zone face of cuprate superconductors in photoemission by Marshall et al [Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 4841 (1996)] and Ding et al [Nature 382, 54 (1996)] is evidence for the decay of the injected hole into a spinon-holon pair.
I argue that the conflict between the fermi-liquid and non-fermi-liquid metallic states viewed by Anderson as the central intellectual issue of cuprate superconductivity, and which motivates the recent criticism by Baskaran and Anderson [cond-mat/9706076] of the work of Zhang [cond-mat/9610140], is a fundamentally wrong concept. All experimental evidence points to adiabatic continuability of the strange metal into a conventional one, and thus to one metallic phase rather than two, and all attempts to account theoretically for the existence of a luttinger-liquid at zero temperature in spatial dimension greater than 1 have failed. I discuss the underlying reasons for this failure and then argue that the true higher-dimensional generalization of the luttinger-liquid behavior is a propensity of the system to order. I speculate about how the conflict between antiferromagnetism and superconductivity, the two principal kinds of order in this problem, might result in both the observed zero-temperature phase diagram of the cuprates and the luttinger-liquid phenomenology, i.e. the breakup of the electron into spinons and holons in certain regimes of doping and energy. The key idea is a quantum critical point regulating a first-order transition between these phases and toward which one is first attracted under renormalization before bifurcating between the two phases.
I propose that the phase transition in Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8 recently observed by by Krishana et al [Science 277, 83 (1997)] is the development of a small d-xy superconducting order parameter phased by pi/2 with respect to the principal d-(x2-y2) one to produce a minimum energy gap delta. The violation of both parity and time-reversal symmetry allows the development of a magnetic moment, the key to explaining the experiment. The origin of this moment is a quantized boundary current of I = 2 e delta / h at zero temperature.
We compute the dynamical magnetic susceptibility of the t-J model in its commensurate flux phase at low hole doping. We compare the calculations with experiments and exact diagonalization studies.
We discuss the problem of broken time reversal symmetry near grain boundaries in a d-wave superconductor based on a Ginzburg-Landau theory. It is shown that such a state can lead to fractional vortices on the grain boundary. Both analytical and numerical results show the structure of this type of state.
It is shown that the dynamics of a single hole in a quantum antiferromagnet (described by the t--J model) can be simply understood in terms of a composite quasiparticle. This description provides naturally two different energy scales t and J corresponding to the inverse masses of the charge (holon) and spin (spinon) elementary excitations respectively. This picture is consistent with the exact results obtained on small clusters for the single hole spectral function and optical conductivity providing that one assumes the existence of a string-like force of magnitude J between the holon and the spinon. Then the hole quasiparticle can be interpreted as a bound state of its two constituents.
It is argued that recent Josephson junction and point-contact tunneling experiments, interpreted as intended by their authors, indicate that time-reversal symmetry breaking occurs at surfaces of cuprate superconductors. The variation among experiments and the failure of previous searches to find $T$-violation are ascribed to disorder and effects of 3-dimensionality. The ``anyon" approach to the $t$-$J$ model is shown to predict a conventional BCS order parameter of $d_{x^2-y^2} + i ε\ d_{xy}$ symmetry, with $ε$ roughly 3 times the doping fraction $δ$, which is consistent with these experiments but not demonstrated by them.
We argue that recent experiments by Kirtley et al. may show evidence of time reversal symmetry breaking in YBCO at crystal grain boundaries. We illustrate this through a Ginzburg-Landau model calculation. Further experimental tests are proposed.
This paper establishes and tests procedures which can determine the electron energy gap of the high-temperature superconductors using the $t\!-\!J$ model with spinon and holon quasiparticles obeying fractional statistics. A simpler problem with similar physics, the spin susceptibility spectrum of the spin 1/2 fractional-statistics gas, is studied. Interactions with the density oscillations of the system substantially decrease the spin gap to a value of $(0.2 \pm 0.2)$ $\hbar ω_c$, much less than the mean-field value of $\hbarω_c$. The lower few Landau levels remain visible, though broadened and shifted, in the spin susceptibility. As a check of the methods, the single-particle Green's function of the non-interacting Bose gas viewed in the fermionic representation, as computed by the same approximation scheme, agrees well with the exact results. The same mechanism would reduce the gap of the $t\!-\!J$ model without eliminating it.