Effects of semiclassical spiral fluctuations on hole dynamics

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of a single hole coupled to the spiral fluctuations related to the magnetic ground states of the antiferromagnetic J1-J2-J3 Heisenberg model on a square lattice. Using exact diagonalization on finite size clusters and the self-consistent Born approximation in the thermodynamic limit, we find, as a general feature, a strong reduction of the quasiparticle weight along the spiral phases of the magnetic phase diagram. For an important region of the Brillouin zone the hole spectral functions are completely incoherent, whereas at low energies the spectral weight is redistributed on several irregular peaks. We find a characteristic value of the spiral pitch Q = (0.7,0.7)π, for which the available phase space for hole scattering is maximum. We argue that this behavior is due to the nontrivial interference of the magnon-assisted and the free-hopping mechanism for hole motion, characteristic of a hole coupled to semiclassical spiral fluctuations.