From Antiferromagnetism to Superconductivity: Numerical Evidence for SO(5) Symmetry

In this work, we present numerical results which support SO(5) symmetry as a concept unifying superconductivity and antiferromagnetism in the high-temperature superconductors. Using exact cluster diagonalization, we verify the recently proposed SO(5) multiplet structures for a widely used microscopic model, the t-J model. Our results show that the d-wave superconducting ground states away from half-filling are obtained from the higher spin states at half-filling through SO(5) rotations, that the dominant low energy resonance in the dynamical spin correlation function corresponds to a `pi-resonance' in the entire low doping region, and that the SO(5) symmetry is robust against inclusion of longer ranged Coulomb repulsion and next-nearest neighbor hopping.