A calculation for polar Kerr effect in high temperature cuprate superconductors

Abstract

A mechanism is proposed for the tantalizing evidence of polar Kerr effect in a class of high temperature superconductors--the signs of the Kerr angle from two opposite faces of the same sample are identical and magnetic field training is non-existent. The mechanism does not break global time reversal symmetry, as in an antiferromagnet, and results in zero Faraday effect. It is best understood in a phenomenological model of bilayer cuprates, such as YBCO, in which intra-bilayer tunneling nucleates a chiral d-density wave such that the individual layers have opposite chirality. Although specific to the chiral d-density wave, the mechanism may be more general to any quasi-two-dimensional orbital antiferromagnet in which time reversal symmetry is broken in each plane, but not when averaged macroscopically.

Replaced with the version accepted in Phys. Rev. B

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Anomalous Hall transport in tilted multi-Weyl semimetals
• Emergence of charge order in a staggered loop-current phase of cuprate high-temperature superconductors
• Mean-field thermodynamic quantum time-space crystal: spontaneous breaking of time-translation symmetry in a macroscopic fermion system
• Charge and current orders in the spin-fermion model with overlapping hot spots