Strange ARPES line shapes and ECFL

Ever since the discovery of high temperature superconductors, these materials have been quite baffling, to say the least. The central question is whether the standard textbook theories that we know and love already are applicable to these fascinating materials. The general sense is that those standard theories must be augmented to a great extent, if not replaced completely. Why? It is because of many puzzling experimental results that defy a proper understanding so far. ARPES results are among the most mysterious!

As the above advertisement of this UCSC work of ours (at Stanford Synchrotron) says, we might be onto solving this conundrum! Major help came from a theoretical breakthrough (ECFL) by Shastry, which seemed to shed light on a long-standing puzzle in high temperature superconductivity in a big way—explaining anomalous ARPES line shapes. But this is not all. Follow the links below, to see how this initial model (simplified ECFL) had to be modified to explain more data and to shed light on the superconductivity.

Links, data

• The paper can be accessed from here or here (public).

• My invited talk at the March meeting 2012: abstract and presentation

• News article at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL)

• Science highlight article at the SSRL

• News article at UC Santa Cruz

• Phenomenological ECFL and more

• The UCSC data analyzed in this paper were obtained by the Gweon group at the SSRL.