Describing hole-doped Mott insulators through spinon-holon bound state excitations*

The introduction of holes in a Mott insulator induces novel quantum states of matter. The low hole-density regime, characterized by strong competition between kinetic and interaction energies of the electrons, is still not well understood.   We study the t-J model within the slave boson formalism in order to obtain an effective mean-field description of low hole-doped Mott insulators.   Under the assumption that there are spinon-holon bound-states, this becomes the quantum dimer model, which has been used by Punk et al., [PNAS, 2015] to describe the pseudogap phase of the cuprate superconductors.  We obtain the phase diagram of such a system and calculate the three-point spin-spin-hole correlations.