Electron Correlation in High Temperature Cuprates

Electron correlation plays a key role in high-temperature cuprate superconductors. Material-parameter dependence of cuprates is important to clarify the mechanism of high temperature superconductivity. In this study, we examine the ground state of the three-band Hubbard model (d-p model) that explicitly includes oxygen p orbitals. We consider the half-filled case with the large on-site Coulomb repulsion Ud by using the variational Monte Carlo method. The ground state is insulating when Ud is large at half-filling. The ground state undergoes a transition from a metal to a Mott insulator when the level difference εp-εd is increased.

Correlated-Electron Systems and High-Temperature Superconductivity

We present recent theoretical results on superconductivity in correlated-electron systems, especially in the two-dimensional Hubbard model and the three-band d-p model. The mechanism of superconductivity in high-temperature superconductors has been extensively studied on the basis of various electronic models and also electron-phonon models. In this study, we investigate the properties of superconductivity in correlated-electron systems by using numerical methods such as the variational Monte Carlo method and the quantum Monte Carlomethod. The Hubbard model is one of basic models for strongly correlated electron systems, and is regarded as the model of cuprate high temperature superconductors. The d-p model is more realistic model for cuprates. The superconducting condensation energy obtained by adopting the Gutzwiller ansatz is in reasonable agreement with the condensation energy estimated for YBa2Cu3O7. We show the phase diagram of the ground state using this method. We have further investigated the stability of striped and checkerboard states in the under-doped region. Holes doped in a half-filled square lattice lead to an incommensurate spin and charge density wave. The relationship of the hole density x and incommensurability δ, δ~x, is satisfied in the lower doping region, as indicated by the variationalMonte Carlocalculations for the two-dimensional Hubbard model. A checkerboard-like charge-density modulation with a roughly period has also been observed by scanning tunneling microscopy experiments in Bi2212 and Na-CCOC compounds. We have performed a variational Monte Carlo simulation on a two-dimensional t-t′-t″- U Hubbard model with a Bi-2212 type band structure and found that the period checkerboard spin modulation, that is characterized by multi Q vectors, is indeed stabilized. We have further performed an investigation by using a quantumMonte Carlomethod, which is a numerical method that can be used to simulate the behavior of correlated electron systems. We present a new algorithm of the quantum Monte Carlo diagonalization that is a method for the evaluation of expectation value without the negative sign problem. We compute pair correlation functions and show that pair correlation is indeed enhanced with hole doping.