Mean-field pairing theory for the charge-stripe phase of high-temperature cuprate superconductors

Abstract

Striped high-T(c) superconductors such as La(2-y-x)Nd(y)Sr(x)CuO(4) and La(2-x)Ba(x)CuO(4) near x = 1/8 show a fascinating competition between spin and charge order and superconductivity. A theory for these systems therefore has to capture both the spin correlations of an antiferromagnet and the pair correlations of a superconductor. For this purpose we present here an effective Hartree-Fock theory incorporating both electron pairing with finite center-of-mass momentum and antiferromagnetism. We show that this theory reproduces the key experimental features such as the formation of the antiferromagnetic stripe patterns at 7/8 band filling or the quasi-one-dimensional electronic structure observed by photoemission spectroscopy.