Nearly Insulating Strongly Correlated Systems: Gossamer Superconductors and Metals

Recently a new phenomenological Hamiltonian was proposed to describe the superconducting cuprates in which correlations and on-site Coulomb repulsion are introduced by partial Gutzwiller projection. This Gossamer Hamiltonian has an exact ground state and differs from the t-J and Hubbard Hamiltonians in possessing a powerful attractive interaction among electrons responsible for Cooper pairing in the d-wave channel. It is a faithful description for a superconductor with strong on-site electronic repulsion. The superconducting tunneling gap remains intact and despite on-site repulsion. Near half-filling the Gossamer superconductor with strong repulsion has suppressed photoemission intensities and superfluid density, is unstable toward an antiferromagnetic insulator and possesses an incipient Mott-Hubbard gap. The Gossamer technique can be applied to metallic ground states thus possibly serving as an apt description of strongly correlated metals. Such a Gossamer metallic phase, just as the Gossamer superconducting one, becomes arbitrarily hard to differentiate from an insulator as one turns the Coulomb correlations up near half-filling. Both the metallic and superconducting states undergo a quantum phase transition to an antiferromagnetic insulator as one increases the on-site Coulomb repulsion. In the Gossamer model we reach the critical point at half-filling by fully projecting out the double occupancy. Such a critical point might be the Anderson Resonating Valence bond state.