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Abstract Measured transport properties of three representative cuprates are reproduced within the paradigm of two electron subsystems, itinerant and localized. The localized subsystem evolves continuously from the Cu 3d $$^9$$ 9 hole at half-filling and corresponds to the (pseudo)gapped parts of the Fermi surface. The itinerant subsystem is observed as a pure Fermi liquid (FL) with material-independent universal mobility across the doping/temperature phase diagram. The localized subsystem affects the itinerant one in our transport calculations solely by truncating the textbook FL integrals to the observed (doping- and temperature-dependent) Fermi arcs. With this extremely simple picture, we obtain the measured evolution of the resistivity and Hall coefficients in all three cases considered, including LSCO which undergoes a Lifshitz transition in the relevant doping range, a complication which turns out to be superficial. Our results imply that prior to evoking polaronic, quantum critical point, quantum dissipation, or even more exotic scenarios for the evolution of transport properties in cuprates, Fermi-surface properties must be addressed in realistic detail.

Polarons are quasiparticles formed when an electron strongly couples to the lattice vibrations, or phonons, in a crystalline material. Here, the authors use soft-X-ray angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy to identify signatures of metal polarons at the interface between two oxide materials.

Nature Communications 7 Article number: 10386 (2016); Published 27 January 2016; Updated 26 February 2016 In the original PDF version of this Article, which was published on 27 January 2016, the publication date was incorrectly given as 27 January 2015. This has now been corrected in the PDF; the HTML version of the paper was correct from the time of publication.