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# Electronic Liquid Crystal Phases of a Doped Mott Insulator

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### Abstract

The character of the ground state of an antiferromagnetic insulator is fundamentally altered upon addition of even a small amount of charge. The added charges agglomerate along domain walls at which the spin correlations, which may or may not remain long-ranged, suffer a $$\pi$$ phase shift. In two dimensions, these domain walls are stripes'' which are either insulating, or conducting, i.e. metallic rivers with their own low energy degrees of freedom. However, quasi one-dimensional metals typically undergo a transition to an insulating ordered charge density wave (CDW) state at low temperatures. Here it is shown that such a transition is eliminated if the zero-point energy of transverse stripe fluctuations is sufficiently large in comparison to the CDW coupling between stripes. As a consequence, there exist novel, liquid-crystalline low-temperature phases -- an electron smectic, with crystalline order in one direction, but liquid-like correlations in the other, and an electron nematic with orientational order but no long-range positional order. These phases, which constitute new states of matter, can be either high temperature supeconductors or two-dimensional anisotropic metallic'' non-Fermi liquids. Evidence for the new phases may already have been obtained by neutron scattering experiments in the cuprate superconductor, La_{1.6-x}Nd_{0.4}Sr_xCuO_{4}.

### Most cited references3

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### Charged magnetic domain lines and the magnetism of high-Tcoxides

(1989)
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### RENORMALIZATION GROUP APPROACH TO QUASI-ONE-DIMENSIONAL CONDUCTORS

(1991)
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### Topological doping of correlated insulators

(1996)
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### Author and article information

###### Journal
30 July 1997
###### Article
10.1038/31177
cond-mat/9707327
Nature 393, 550-553 (1998).
5 pages in RevTex with two figures in eps
cond-mat

Condensed matter