Dynamics of metallic stripes in cuprates

We study the dynamics of metallic vertical stripes in cuprates within the three-band Hubbard model based on a recently developed time dependent Gutzwiller approximation. As doping increases the optical conductivity shows transfer of spectral weight from the charge transfer band towards i) an incoherent band centered at 1.3eV, {ii} a Drude peak, mainly due to motion along the stripe, {iii} a low energy collective mode which softens with doping and merges with ii} at optimum doping in good agreement with experiment. The softening is related to the quasidegeneracy between Cu centered and O centered mean-field stripe solutions close to optimal doping.