Renormalization of quasiparticle hopping integrals by spin interactions in layered copper oxides

Holes doped within the square CuO2 network specific to the cuprate superconducting materials have oxygen 2p character. We investigate the basic properties of such oxygen holes by wave-function-based quantum chemical calculations on large embedded clusters. We find that a 2p hole induces ferromagnetic correlations among the nearest-neighbor Cu 3d spins. When moving through the antiferromagnetic background, the hole must bring along this spin-polarization cloud at nearby Cu sites, which gives rise to a substantial reduction of the effective hopping parameters. Such interactions can explain the relatively low values inferred for the effective hoppings by fitting the angle-resolved photoemission data. The effect of the background antiferromagnetic couplings of renormalizing the effective nearest-neighbor hopping is also confirmed by density-matrix renormalization-group model-Hamiltonian calculations for chains and ladders of CuO4 plaquettes.