Antiferromagnetic and superconducting gaps and their interrelation in high-Tc cuprates

We propose a phenomenological model, comprising a microscopic SO(5) model plus the on-site Hubbard interaction U (projected SO(5) model) to understand the interrelation between the d-wave-gap modulation observed by recent angle-resolved photoemission experiments in the insulating antiferromagnet Ca2CuO2Cl2 and the d-wave gap of high-T-c superconducting materials. The on-site interaction U is important in order to produce a Mott gap of the correct order of magnitude, which would be absent in an exact SO(5) theory. The projected SO(5)-model explains the gap characteristics, namely both the symmetry and the different order of magnitude of the gap modulations between the antiferromagnetic and the superconducting phases. Furthermore, it is shown that the projected SO (5) theory can provide an explanation for a recent observation [E. Pavarini et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 47003 (2001)], i. e. that the maximum T-c observed in a large variety of high-T-c cuprates scales with the next-nearest-neighbor hopping matrix element t'.