Open Access

Bernhard Edegger

• We consider the theory of high temperature superconductivity from the viewpoint of a strongly correlated electron system. In particular, we discuss Gutzwiller projected wave functions, which incorporate strong correlations by prohibiting double occupancy in orbitals with strong on-site repulsion. After a general overview on high temperature superconductivity, we discuss Anderson’s resonating valence bond (RVB) picture and its implementation by renormalized mean field theory (RMFT) and variational Monte Carlo (VMC) techniques. In the following, we present a detailed review on RMFT and VMC results with emphasis on our recent contributions. Especially, we are interested in spectral features of Gutzwiller-Bogoliubov quasiparticles obtained by extending VMC and RMFT techniques to excited states. We explicitly illustrate this method to determine the quasiparticle weight and provide a comparison with angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). We conclude by summarizing recent successes and by discussing open questions, which must be solved for a thorough understanding of high temperature superconductivity by Gutzwiller projected wave functions.