Stripes and Charge Transport Properties of High-T_c Cuprates

Abstract

Unusual features in the in-plane charge transport in lightly hole-doped La_{2-x}Sr_{x}CuO_{4} single crystals are described. Notably, both the in-plane resistivity and the Hall coefficient show a metallic behavior at moderate temperatures even in the long-range-ordered antiferromagnetic phase, which obviously violates the Mott-Ioffe-Regel criterion for the metallic transport and can hardly be understood without employing the role of charge stripes. Moreover, the mobility of holes in this "metallic" antiferromagnetic state is found to be virtually the same as that in optimally-doped crystals, which strongly suggests that the stripes govern the charge transport in a surprisingly wide doping range up to optimum doping.Comment: Invited paper at ICTP Workshop on Intrinsic Multiscale Structure and Dynamics in Complex Electronic Oxides, Trieste, July 2002. (To be published in the Proceedings of the ICTP Workshop as a World Scientific book.) Some statements are revised and references are added in response to the comments from theorist friend