Visualizing the atomic scale electronic structure of the Ca2CuO2Cl2 Mott insulator

Abstract

Although the mechanism of superconductivity in the cuprates remains elusive, it is generally agreed that at the heart of the problem is the physics of doped Mott insulators. The cuprate parent compound has one unpaired electron per Cu site, and is predicted by band theory to be a half-filled metal. The strong onsite Coulomb repulsion, however, prohibits electron hopping between neighboring sites and leads to a Mott insulator ground state with antiferromagnetic (AF) ordering. Charge carriers doped into the CuO2 plane destroy the insulating phase and superconductivity emerges as the carrier density is sufficiently high. The natural starting point for tackling high Tc superconductivity is to elucidate the electronic structure of the parent Mott insulator and the behavior of a single doped charge. Here we use a scanning tunneling microscope to investigate the atomic scale electronic structure of the Ca2CuO2Cl2 parent Mott insulator of the cuprates. The full electronic spectrum across the Mott-Hubbard gap is uncovered for the first time, which reveals the particle-hole symmetric and spatially uniform Hubbard bands. A single electron donated by surface defect is found to create a broad in-gap electronic state that is strongly localized in space with spatial characteristics intimately related to the AF spin background. The unprecedented real space electronic structure of the parent cuprate sheds important new light on the origion of high Tc superconductivity from the doped Mott insulator perspective.

26 pages, 4 figures, supplementary information included

References in corpus (6)

• A `checkerboard' electronic crystal state in lightly hole-doped Ca_{2-x}Na_{x}CuO_{2}Cl_{2}
• An Intrinsic Bond-Centered Electronic Glass with Unidirectional Domains in Underdoped Cuprates
• Visualizing pair formation on the atomic scale in the high-Tc superconductor Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+d
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• Comment on "Measurement of x-ray absorption spectra of overdoped high-temperature cuprate superconductors: Inapplicability of the single-band Hubbard model"
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Cited by in corpus (50)

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• Universality of pseudogap and emergent order in lightly doped Mott insulators
• Antiferromagnetic Ground State of La${}_2$CuO${}_4$: A Parameter-free Ab Initio Description
• Nodeless pairing in superconducting copper-oxide monolayer films on Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ
• Emergence of a coherent in-gap state in SmB6 Kondo insulator revealed by scanning tunneling spectroscopy
• Landscape of competing stripe and magnetic phases in cuprates
• Orbital-driven Mottness collapse in 1T-TaS2-xSex transition metal dichalcogenide
• Imaging the evolution of metallic states in a spin-orbit interaction driven correlated iridate
• Visualizing the periodic modulation of Cooper pairing in a severely underdoped cuprate
• Interplay of electron-electron and electron-phonon interactions in the low temperature phase of 1T-TaS2
• Relationship between the parent charge transfer gap and maximum transition temperature in cuprates
• Local density of states study of a spin-orbit-coupling induced Mott insulator Sr${}_2$IrO${}_4$
• Discovery of a Single-Band Mott Insulator in a van der Waals Flat-Band Compound
• Visualizing the microscopic coexistence of spin density wave and superconductivity in underdoped NaFe1-xCoxAs
• Evidence for a spinon Kondo effect in cobalt atoms on single-layer 1T-TaSe${}_2$
• Atomic scale electronic structure of the ferromagnetic semiconductor Cr2Ge2Te6
• Strong correlation induced charge localization in antiferromagnets
• Mott phase in a van der Waals transition-metal halide at single layer limit
• Direct visualization of ambipolar Mott transition in cuprate CuO2 planes
• Momentum-Resolved Visualization of Electronic Evolution in Doping a Mott Insulator
• Effects of interaction strength, doping, and frustration on the antiferromagnetic phase of the two-dimensional Hubbard model
• Revealing the Coulomb interaction strength in a cuprate superconductor
• Evolution of Charge and Pair Density Modulations in Overdoped Bi2Sr2CuO6+delta
• Effect of structural supermodulation on superconductivity in tri-layer cuprate Bi2Sr2Ca2Cu3O10+x
• Direct observation of the Mott gap in strontium iridate with a scanning tunneling microscope
• Low-Temperature Pseudogap Phenomenon: Precursor of High-$T_c$ Superconductivity
• Particle-hole asymmetric superconducting coherence peaks in overdoped cuprates
• Hidden spin current in doped Mott antiferromagnets
• Charge dynamics of the antiferromagnetically ordered Mott insulator
• Localized in-gap state in a single electron doped Mott insulator
• Evidence for Multiple Underlying Fermi Surface and Isotropic Energy Gap in the Cuprate Parent Compound Ca${}_2$CuO${}_2$Cl${}_2$
• Structural phase transition and electronic structure evolution in Ir1-xPtxTe2 studied by scanning tunneling microscopy
• Quasiparticle interference and charge order in a heavily overdoped non-superconducting cuprate
• Nanoscale phase separation in deep underdoped Bi${}_2$Sr${}_2$CuO${}_{6+\delta }$ and Ca${}_2$CuO${}_2$Cl${}_2$
• Molecular beam epitaxy growth and surface structure of Sr1-xNdxCuO2 cuprate films
• Spectral evolution with doping of an antiferromagnetic Mott state
• Electronic inhomogeneity and band structure on superstructural CuO2 planes of infinite-layer Sr0.94La0.06CuO2+y films
• Direct evidence of intrinsic Mott state and its layer-parity oscillation in a breathing kagome crystal down to monolayer
• Spin-polaron ladder spectrum of the spin-orbit-induced Mott insulator Sr${}_2$IrO${}_4$ probed by scanning tunneling spectroscopy
• Local Density of States induced near Impurities in Mott Insulators
• Real-space observation of charge ordering in epitaxial La2-xSrxCuO4 films
• Monopoles, confinement and charge localization in the t-J model with dilute holes
• Mottness, Phase String, and High-$T_c$ Superconductivity
• Impurity-induced Mott ring states and Mott zeros ring states in the Hubbard operator formalism
• An Emergent World of Gauge Force and Partons
• Ultrafast charge-transfer dynamics in Ca${}_2$CuO${}_2$Cl${}_2$ from time-resolved optical reflectivity
• Persistent Fermi Pockets and Robust Electron Pairing in Lightly Doped CuO${}_2$ Planes of Cuprate Superconductors