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Small phonon contribution to the photoemission kink in the copper oxide superconductors

Abstract

Despite over two decades of intense research efforts, the origin of high-temperature superconductivity in the copper oxides remains elusive. Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy experiments1,2 have revealed a kink in the dispersion relations (energy versus wavevector) of electronic states in the copper oxides at binding energies of 50-80 meV, raising the hope that this anomaly could be a key to understanding high-temperature superconductivity. The kink is often interpreted in terms of interactions between the electrons and a bosonic field. Although there is no consensus on the nature of the bosons (or even whether a boson model is appropriate), both phonons1 and spin fluctuations2 have been proposed as possible candidates. Here we report first-principles calculations of the role of phonons and the electron–phonon interaction in the photoemission spectra of La2 - xSr x CuO4. Our calculations within the standard formalism demonstrate that the phonon-induced renormalization of the electron energies and the Fermi velocity is almost one order of magnitude smaller than the effect observed in photoemission experiments. Therefore, our result rules out electron–phonon interaction in bulk La2 - xSr x CuO4 as the exclusive origin of the measured kink. Our conclusions are consistent with those reached independently in a recent study3 of the related compound YBa2Cu3O7.

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Figure 1: Phonons of La 2 -  x Sr x CuO 4 at optimal doping ( x = 0.15).
Figure 2: Calculated electron self-energy in LSCO due to the electron–phonon interaction.
Figure 3: Electron–phonon matrix elements.
Figure 4: Comparison between theory and experiment.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Z. X. Shen, A. Lanzara, Y.-W. Son, and C.-H. Park for discussions. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division, of the US Department of Energy. Computational resources were provided by NPACI and NERSC. Part of the calculations were performed using modified versions of the packages Wannier90 and Quantum-ESPRESSO. The Fermi surfaces were rendered using the program XCrySDen (version 1.4.1).

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Correspondence to Steven G. Louie.

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This files contains Supplementary Discussion, Supplementary References and Supplementary Figure 1-3 including legends. (PDF 2897 kb)

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Giustino, F., Cohen, M. & Louie, S. Small phonon contribution to the photoemission kink in the copper oxide superconductors. Nature 452, 975–978 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06874

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