Confinement transitions of the cuprate pseudogap metal

The pseudogap metal phase of the hole-doped cuprates can be described by small Fermi surfaces of electron-like quasiparticles, which enclose a volume violating the Luttinger relation.

This violation requires the existence of additional fractionalized excitations which can be viewed as fractionalized remnants of the paramagnon. Such a theory provides a good description of photoemission observations in the normal state in both the nodal and anti-nodal regions of the Brillouin zone. In this work we consider confinement transitions of such a metallic state upon lowering temperature. The confining state must either be a Luttinger-relation-obeying Fermi liquid, or break charge conservation or translational symmetry; we explore various possibilities with one or more of superconducting, and spin and charge density wave orders.