Numerical evidence of fluctuating stripes in the normal state of high-Tc cuprate superconductors

Abstract

Upon doping, Mott insulators often exhibit symmetry breaking where charge carriers and their spins organize into patterns known as stripes. For high-Tc superconducting cuprates, stripes are widely suspected to exist in a fluctuating form. Here, we use numerically exact determinant quantum Monte Carlo calculations to demonstrate dynamical stripe correlations in the three-band Hubbard model, which represents the local electronic structure of the Cu-O plane. Our results, which are robust to varying parameters, cluster size, and boundary condition, strongly support the interpretation of a variety of experimental observations in terms of the physics of fluctuating stripes, including the hourglass magnetic dispersion and the Yamada plot of incommensurability vs. doping. These findings provide a novel perspective on the intertwined orders emerging from the cuprates' normal state.