Chiral Symmetry Breaking and Phase Fluctuations in Cuprate Superconductors: A QED3 Unified Theory of the Pseudogap State
Abstract
A d-wave superconductor, its phase coherence progressively destroyed by unbinding of vortex-antivortex pairs, suffers an instability related to chiral symmetry breaking in two-flavor QED3. The chiral manifold exhibits large degeneracy spanned by physical states acting as inherent ``competitors'' of d-wave superconductivity. Two of these states are associated with antiferromagnetic insulator and ``stripe'' phases, known to be stable in the pseudogap regime of cuprates near half-filling. The theory also predicts additional, yet unobserved state: a d+ip phase-incoherent superconductor.
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