Local density of states induced near impurities in Mott insulators

The local density of states near dopants or impurities has recently been probed by scanning tunneling microscopy in both the parent and very lightly doped compounds of the high-Tc cuprate superconductors. Our calculations based on a slave-rotor description account for all the following key features of the observed local density of states: i) positions and amplitudes of the in-gap spectral weights of a single impurity; ii) the spectral weight transfer from the upper Hubbard band to the lower Hubbard band; iii) the difference between the cases of single and multiple impurities. For multiple impurities, our study explains the complete suppression of spectral weight observed at precisely the Fermi energy and links this property to zeros of the underlying bulk Green's function of the Mott insulating phase.