Doping driven Small-to-Large Fermi surface transition and d-wave superconductivity in a two-dimenional Kondo lattice

We study the two-dimensional Kondo lattice model with an additional Heisenberg exchange between localized spins. In a first step we use mean-field theory with two order parameters. The first order parameter is a complex pairing amplitude between conduction electrons and localized spins which describes condensation of Kondo (or Zhang-Rice) singlets. A nonvanishing value implies that the localized spins contribute to the Fermi surface volume. The second order parameter describes singlet-pairing between the localized spins and competes with the Kondo-pairing order parameter. Reduction of the carrier density in the conduction band reduces the energy gain due to the formation of the large Fermi surface and induces a phase transition to a state with strong singlet correlations between the localized spins and a Fermi surface which comprises only the conduction electrons. The model thus shows a doping-driven change of its Fermi surface volume. At intermediate doping and low temperature there is a phase where both order parameters coexist, which has a gapped large Fermi surface and d-wave superconductivity. The theory thus qualitatively reproduces the phase diagram of cuprate superconductors. In the second part of the paper we show how the two phases with different Fermi surface volume emerge in a strong coupling theory applicable in limit of large Kondo exchange. The large-Fermi-surface phase corresponds to a `vacuum' of localized Kondo singlets with uniform phase and the quasiparticles are spin-1/2 charge fluctuations around this fully paired state. In the small-Fermi-surface phase the quasiparticles correspond to propagating Kondo-singlets or triplets whereby the phase of a given Kondo-singlet corresponds to its momentum. In this picture a phase transition occurs for low filling of the conduction band as well.Comment: Revtex file, 17 pages, 14 eps-figure

Theory of the Lightly Doped Mott Insulator

A theory for the Hubbard model appropriate in the limit of large U/t, small doping away from half-filling and short-ranged antiferromagnetic spin correlations is presented. Despite the absence of any broken symmetry the Fermi surface takes the form of elliptical hole pockets centered near (pi/2,pi/2) with a volume proportional to the hole concentration. Short range antiferromagnetic correlations render the nearest neighbor hopping almost ineffective so that only second or third nearest neighbor hopping contributes appreciably to the dispersion relation.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

Inverse photoemission in strongly correlated electron systems

Based on exact results for small clusters of 2D t-J model we demonstrate the existence of several distinct `channels' in its inverse photoemission (IPES) spectrum. Hole-like quasiparticles can either be annihilated completely, or leave behind a variable number of spin excitations, which formed the `dressing cloud' of the annihilated hole. In the physical parameter regime the latter processes carry the bulk of IPES weight and although the Fermi surface takes the form of hole pockets, the distribution of spectal weight including these `magnon-bands' in the IPES spectrum is reminiscent of free electrons. The emerging scenario for Fermiology and spectral weight distribution is shown to be consistent with photoemission, inverse photemission and de Haas--van Alphen experiments on cuprate superconductors.Comment: Revtex file, 4 PRB pages + three figures appended as uu-encoded postscript. Hardcopies of figures (or the entire manuscript) can also be obtained by e-mail request to: [email protected]

Landau mapping and Fermi liquid parameters of the 2D t-J model

We study the momentum distribution function n(k) in the 2D t-J model on small clusters by exact diagonalization. We show that n(k) can be decomposed systematically into two components with Bosonic and Fermionic doping dependence. The Bosonic component originates from the incoherent motion of holes and has no significance for the low energy physics. For the Fermionic component we exlicitely perform the one-to-one Landau mapping between the low lying eigenstates of the t-J model clusters and those of an equivalent system of spin-1/2 quasiparticles. This mapping allows to extract the quasiparticle dispersion, statistics, and Landau parameters. The results show conclusively that the 2D t-J model for small doping is a Fermi liquid with a `small' Fermi surface and a moderately strong attractive interaction between the quasiparticles.Comment: Revtex file, 5 pages with 5 embedded eps-files, hardcopies of figures (or the entire manuscript) can be obtained by e-mail request to: [email protected]

Spectral density for a hole in an antiferromagnetic stripe phase

Using variational trial wave function based on the string picture we study the motion of a single mobile hole in the stripe phase of the doped antiferromagnet. The holes within the stripes are taken to be static, the undoped antiferromagnetic domains in between the hole stripes are assumed to have alternating staggered magnetization, as is suggested by neutron scattering experiments. The system is described by the t-t'-t''-J model with realistic parameters and we compute the single particle spectral density.Comment: RevTex-file, 9 PRB pages with 15 .eps and .gif files. To appear in PRB. Hardcopies of figures (or the entire manuscript) can be obtained by e-mail request to: [email protected]