Electronic spectra with paramagnon fractionalization in the single band Hubbard model

Abstract

We examine the spectral properties of a recently proposed theory of the intermediate temperature pseudogap metal phase of the cuprates. We show that this theory can be obtained from the familiar paramagnon theory of nearly antiferromagnetic metals by fractionalizing the paramagnon into two `hidden' layers of S=1/2 spins. The first hidden layer of spins hybridizes with the electrons as in a Kondo lattice heavy Fermi liquid, while the second hidden layer of spins forms a spin liquid with fractionalized spinon excitations. We compute the imaginary part of the electronic self energy induced by the spinon excitations. The energy and momentum dependence of the photoemission spectrum across the Brillouin zone provides a good match to observations by He et al. in Bi2201 (Science 331, 1579 (2011)) and by Chen et al. in Bi2212 (Science 366, 1099 (2019)).