Stripes and Nematicity in a Hole-Doped Three-Orbital Spin-Fermion Model for Superconducting Cuprates

Numerical studies of a spin-fermion model that captures the charge-transfer properties
of Cu-based high critical temperature superconductors[1] reveal the spin and charge order
in the parent compound and under hole doping. In clusters of dimension 16X4, that break the
rotational symmetry, half-filled stripes are observed upon hole doping, i.e., n stripes of length
4 develop when 2n holes are introduced in the system. The antiferromagnetic order observed in
the parent compound develops a pi-shift across each stripe and the magnetic structure factor peaks
at momentum k=(π-δ,π) with δ=2πN_h/2L where L=16 and N_h is the number of doped holes.
The electronic charge is also modulated and the charge structure factor peaks at k=(2δ,0).
In addition, orbital nematicity with <n_px>-<n_py>≠ 0 develops as electrons are removed from
the system. These results indicate that the spin and charge distribution experimentally observed in
hole-doped cuprates is captured by unbiased Monte Carlo studies of a doped charge-transfer insulator.

[1] M. Hussein, et al., Phys.Rev.B 98,035124 (2018).