Electronic polymers and soft-matter-like broken symmetries in underdoped cuprates

Abstract

Empirical evidence in heavy fermion, pnictide, and other systems suggests that unconventional superconductivity appears associated to some form of real-space electronic order. For the cuprates, despite several proposals, the emergence of order in the phase diagram between the commensurate antiferromagnetic state and the superconducting state is not well understood. Here we show that in this regime doped holes assemble in "electronic polymers." Within a Monte Carlo study we find, that in clean systems by lowering the temperature the polymer melt condenses first in a smectic state and then in a Wigner crystal both with the addition of inversion symmetry breaking. Disorder blurs the positional order leaving a robust inversion symmetry breaking and a nematic order, accompanied by vector chiral spin order and with the persistence of a thermodynamic transition. Such electronic phases, whose properties are reminiscent of soft-matter physics, produce charge and spin responses in good accord with experiments.

10 pages, 4 figures plus supplementary information

References in corpus (7)

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• Lattice symmetry breaking in cuprate superconductors: Stripes, nematics, and superconductivity
• Vector chiral and multipolar orders in the spin-1/2 frustrated ferromagnetic chain in magnetic field
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Cited by in corpus (16)

• Long-range interacting quantum systems
• High-temperature charge density wave correlations in La${}_{1.875}$Ba${}_{0.125}$CuO${}_4$ without spin-charge locking
• Dynamical charge density waves rule the phase diagram of cuprates
• Nematic fluctuations and the magneto-structural phase transition in $\mathrm{Ba}(\mathrm{F}{\mathrm{e}}_{1-\mathrm{x}}\mathrm{C}{\mathrm{o}}_{\mathrm{x}}{)}_2\mathrm{A}{\mathrm{s}}_2$
• Charge ordering in superconducting copper oxides
• Charge order at high temperature in cuprate superconductors
• Multiferroic magnetic spirals induced by random magnetic exchanges
• Two-Hole Ground State: Dichotomy in Pairing Symmetry
• Spiral order from orientationally correlated random bonds in classical XY models
• Unconventional short-range structural fluctuations in cuprate high-$T_c$ superconductors
• Magnetostriction and magneto-structural domains in antiferromagnetic YBa${}_2$Cu${}_3$O${}_6$
• Protected superconductivity at the boundaries of charge-density-wave domains
• Clocking the Onset of Bilayer Coherence in a High-${\mathrm{T}}_{\mathrm{C}}$ Cuprate
• Coincident onset of charge order and pseudogap in a homogeneous high-temperature superconductor
• Opening a nodal gap by fluctuating spin-density-wave in lightly doped La${}_{2-x}$Sr${}_x$CuO${}_4$
• Singling out the effect of quenched disorder in the phase diagram of cuprates