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Visualizing the evolution from the Mott insulator to a charge-ordered insulator in lightly doped cuprates

Nature Physics volume 12, pages 1047–1051 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

High-temperature superconductivity in the cuprates is widely believed to originate from an antiferromagnetic parent Mott insulator when doped with charge carriers1. In terms of the electronic structure, the key question is how the large charge transfer gap evolves into the pseudogap and then the d-wave superconducting gap2,3,4,5. However, whether superconductivity or some other symmetry-breaking state (such as charge or spin orders) emerges first on doping a Mott insulator is debatable. To address these issues, here we use scanning tunnelling microscopy to investigate the local electronic structure of lightly doped cuprates in the antiferromagnetic insulating regime. We show that the doped charge induces a spectral weight transfer from the high-energy Hubbard bands to low-energy states within the charge transfer gap. With increasing doping, a V-shaped density-of-state suppression reminiscent of the pseudogap occurs at the Fermi level, which is accompanied by the emergence of chequerboard charge order. Our data suggest that the cuprates first become a charge-ordered insulator on doping, and the Fermi surface and high-temperature superconductivity becomes manifest on further doping.

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Figure 1: Electronic structure of lightly hole-doped La-Bi2201 near the Mott insulator limit.
Figure 2: DOS map of the p = 0.03 sample measured at varied biases.
Figure 3: The electronic structure evolution and chequerboard charge order in the p = 0.07 sample.
Figure 4: The wavevector of the chequerboard charge order.

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Acknowledgements

We thank T. K. Lee, N. Trivedi, F. Wang, Z. Y. Weng, T. Xiang and G. M. Zhang for helpful discussions. This work is supported by the NSFC and MOST of China (2011CB921703, 2011CBA00110, 2015CB921000), and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB07020300). D.-H.L. was supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division, grant DE-AC02-05CH11231.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, State Key Laboratory of Low Dimensional Quantum Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

    Peng Cai, Wei Ruan, Cun Ye, Xintong Li, Zhenqi Hao & Yayu Wang

  2. Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China

    Yingying Peng & Xingjiang Zhou

  3. Innovation Center of Quantum Matter, Beijing 100084, China

    Xingjiang Zhou & Yayu Wang

  4. Department of Physics, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

    Dung-Hai Lee

  5. Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

    Dung-Hai Lee

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  1. Peng Cai
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Contributions

P.C., W.R., C.Y., X.L. and Z.H. carried out the STM experiments. Y.P. and X.Z. grew the La-Bi2201 single crystals. D.-H.L. provided theoretical analysis. Y.W. designed the project and prepared the manuscript. All authors have read and approved the final version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yayu Wang.

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Cai, P., Ruan, W., Peng, Y. et al. Visualizing the evolution from the Mott insulator to a charge-ordered insulator in lightly doped cuprates. Nature Phys 12, 1047–1051 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3840

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