Correlation Induced Vanishing of the Gap Function on the Fermi Surface in High T_c Superconductors

We present physical arguments as well as numerical evidence to show that the Cooper pair (gap) function vanishes on the Fermi surface in strongly correlated electron systems such as \tJ and \lU Hubbard models in one and two dimensions. Using exact diagonalization, we study a correlation function which is a measure of the gap function even in a finite system, and present numerical results for this correlation function on small clusters of 8 (Hubbard) and 16 ($t-J$) sites.