Competing orders in thermally fluctuating superconductors in two dimensions

Abstract

We extend recent low temperature analyses of competing orders in the cuprate superconductors to the pseudogap regime where all orders are fluctuating. A universal continuum limit of a classical Ginzburg-Landau functional is used to characterize fluctuations of the superconducting order: this describes the crossover from Gaussian fluctuations at high temperatures to the vortex-binding physics near the onset of global phase coherence. These fluctuations induce affiliated corrections in the correlations of other orders, and in particular, in the different realizations of charge order. Implications for scanning tunnelling spectroscopy and neutron scattering experiments are noted: there may be a regime of temperatures near the onset of superconductivity where the charge order is enhanced with increasing temperatures.