Effect of superlattice modulation of electronic parameters on superconducting density of states in cuprate superconductors

Recent scanning tunneling microscopy on BSCCO 2212 has revealed a substantial spatial supermodulation of the energy gap in the superconducting state. We propose that this gap modulation is due to the superlattice modulations of the atoms in the structure, and hence the parameters in a microscopic model of the CuO2 plane. The gap modulation is estimated using renormalized mean field theory for a t-t'-J model on a superlattice. The results compare well with experiment.