Pair density wave driven charge order in cuprates

Recently, a pair density wave (PDW) state has been argued to exist in underdoped cuprate compound BSCCO based on Josephson tunneling spectroscopy [1]. We investigate the possibility that charge order, observed in most cuprate materials, is driven by PDW correlations. In particular, we study unidirectional, commensurate PDW states with a periodicity of eight lattice constants coexisting with uniform d-wave superconductivity within a renormalized mean-field theory treatment of the extended t - J model [2]. We find that the PDW induces a d-form factor charge order with the same periodicity. In this state, the local density of states (LDOS) maps and intra-unit cell form factors at various biases, computed using a recently developed Wannier function based method, compare well with the corresponding scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) results. We discuss the effects of discommensuration, finite correlation lengths, and disorder on such PDW driven charge ordered states.

[1] M. Hamidian et al., Nature 532, 343 (2016).
[2] P. Choubey et al., New J. Phys. 19, 013028 (2017).