Abstract
Motivated by the recently observed pattern of unidirectional domains in high- superconductors [Y. Kohsaka et al., Science 315, 1380 (2007)], we investigate the emergence of spontaneous modulations in the -wave superconducting resonating valence bond phase using the - model at doping. Half-filled charge domains separated by four lattice spacings are found to form along one of the crystal axes, leading to modulated superconductivity with out-of-phase -wave order parameters in neighboring domains. Both renormalized mean-field theory and variational Monte Carlo calculations reveal that the energies of modulated and uniform phases are very close to each other.
- Received 6 August 2007
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.76.140505
©2007 American Physical Society