Hole-pair hopping in arrangements of hole-rich/hole-poor domains in a quantum antiferromagnet

We study the motion of holes in a doped quantum antiferromagnet in the presence of arrangements of hole-rich and hole-poor domains such as the stripe-phase in high-TC cuprates. When these structures form, it becomes energetically favorable for single holes, pairs of holes or small bound-hole clusters to hop from one hole-rich domain to another due to quantum fluctuations. However, we find that at temperature of approximately 100 K, the probability for bound hole-pair exchange between neighboring hole-rich regions in the stripe phase, is one or two orders of magnitude larger than single-hole or multi-hole droplet exchange. As a result holes in a given hole-rich domain penetrate further into the antiferromagnetically aligned domains when they do it in pairs. At temperature T 100 K and below bound pairs of holes hop from one hole-rich domain to another with high probability. Therefore our main finding is that the presence of the antiferromagnetic hole-poor domains act as a filter which selects, from the hole-rich domains (where holes form a self-bound liquid), hole pairs which can be exchanged throughout the system. This fluid of bound hole pairs can undergo a superfluid phase ordering at the abovementioned temperature scale. © 2003 The American Physical Society.