Eur. Phys. J. B (2017) 90: 154
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2017-80233-2

Regular Article

Theory of dual fermion superconductivity in hole-doped cuprates

¹ College of Physics and Information Technology, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an 710119, P.R. China
² Institute of Theoretical Physics, CAS, Beijing 100190, P.R. China
³ Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, Beijing 100088, P.R. China

^a e-mail: jun.chang@hotmail.com

Received: 21 April 2017
Received in final form: 19 June 2017
Published online: 9 August 2017

Abstract

Since the discovery of the cuprate high-temperature superconductivity in 1986, a universal phase diagram has been constructed experimentally and numerous theoretical models have been proposed. However, there remains no consensus on the underlying physics thus far. Here, we theoretically investigate the phase diagram of hole-doped cuprates based on an itinerant-localized dual fermion model, with the charge carriers doped on the oxygen sites and localized holes on the copper d_{x² − y²} orbitals. We analytically demonstrate that the puzzling anomalous normal state or the strange metal could simply stem from a free Fermi gas of carriers bathing in copper antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations. The short-range high-energy spin excitations also act as the “magnetic glue” of carrier Cooper pairs and induce d-wave superconductivity from the underdoped to overdoped regime, distinctly different from the conventional low-frequency magnetic fluctuation mechanism. We further sketch out the characteristic dome-shaped critical temperature T_c versus doping level. The emergence of the pseudogap is ascribed to the localization of partial carriers coupled to the local copper moments or a crossover from the strange metal to a nodal Kondo-like insulator. Our work provides a consistent theoretical framework to understand the typical phase diagram of hole-doped cuprates and paves a distinct way to the studies of both non-Fermi liquid and unconventional superconductivity in strongly correlated systems.