Phenomenological Theories of the Low-Temperature Pseudogap: Hall Number, Specific Heat, and Seebeck Coefficient

Many phenomenological models have successfully reproduced the jump from p to 1+p found for the Hall number at the critical doping p* for the pseudogap in YBCO [1], at low temperature and with superconductivity supressed. More experiments and theoretical calculations are needed to discriminate between those theories.

In this talk, we present computations [2] of the thermopower and of the specific heat for three theories: the antiferromagnet [3], Yang-Rice-Zhang theory [3] and the spiral incommensurate antiferromagnet [4]. All our calculations predict rapid changes in the vicinity of p*, because of the electron pockets found in these models. We also investigate the effects of the van Hove singularity.

[1] Badoux et al., Nature 531, 210.
[2] Verret et al., Phys. Rev. B 96, 125139.
[3] Storey, EPL 113, 27003
[4] Eberlein et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 187001