Tendency of nematicity in the extremely underdoped t-J model

Underdoped cuprates exhibiting electronic nematicity have been reported by various measurements such as scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) [1, 2] and resistivity [3]. These results indicate that nematicity already exists in very lightly doped thin film, which motivates us to study the extremely underdoped t-J model and Heisenberg model via variational Monte Carlo (VMC) method and renormalization mean-field theory(RMFT). In the previous VMC study of the Heisenberg model, various groups have confirmed that the uniform RVB+AFM trial wave function has the lowest energy[4], which is very close to the best numerical estimation of the exact ground state energy. However, we found that various C4 broken states are almost degenerate with the uniform solution. Also, we will study the lightly doped cases with one hole only.


[1]P. Cai, et al Nat. Phys. 12, 1047 (2016).
[2]S. Mukhopadhyay et al Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.116 (27) 13249 (2019).
[3]J. Wu, et al Nature 547, 432 (2017).
[4]A. Himeda and M. Ogata: Phys. Rev. B 60 R9935 (1999).