Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy of band tails in lightly doped cuprates.pdfVIP

a r X i v : c o n d - m a t / 0 7 0 2 6 0 9 v 3 [ c o n d - m a t .s u p r - c o n ] 3 1 M a r 2 0 0 7 Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy of band tails in lightly doped cuprates A. S. Alexandrov and K. Reynolds Department of Physics, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, United Kingdom We amend ab initio strongly-correlated band structures by taking into account the band-tailing phenomenon in doped charge-transfer Mott-Hubbard insulators. We show that the photoemission from band tails accounts for sharp ”quasi-particle” peaks, rapid loss of their intensities in some di- rections of the Brillouin zone (”Fermi-arcs”) and high-energy ”waterfall” anomalies as a consequence of matrix-element effects of disorder-localised states in the charge-transfer gap of doped cuprates. PACS numbers: 71.38.-k, 74.40.+k, 72.15.Jf, 74.72.-h, 74.25.Fy Since the discovery of high-Tc superconductivity in cuprates, angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) has offered a tremendous advance into the understanding of their electronic structure [1]. How- ever, even though ARPES is continually strengthening our insights into the band structure and correlations in cuprates, it has also revealed many poorly under- stood phenomena, such as the incoherent ”background”, the sharp ”quasi-particle” peaks near some points of the Brillouin zone (BZ), which form ”arcs” of ”Fermi surface” (FS) ([2] and references therein), widely stud- ied low-energy dip-hump and kink features (for review see [1]) and the more recently discovered steep down- turn of the dispersion toward higher energies (the so- called ”waterfall”) [3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. These anomalies have received quite different interpretations, involving, for example, uncorrelated [11] and strongly-correlated [3, 12, 13, 14, 15] lattice polarons, Migdal-Eliashberg-like approaches [16, 17], spinons and holons [4], spin polarons [6], spin fluctuations [10, 18] and band-structure matrix element effects [9, 19]. Many ARPES