title: Pseudogap in doped Mott insulators is the near-neighbor analogue of the Mott gap.
abstract: We show that the strong-coupling physics inherent to the insulating Mott state in 2D leads to a jump in the chemical potential upon doping and the emergence of a pseudogap in the single-particle spectrum below a characteristic temperature. The pseudogap arises because any singly occupied site not immediately neighboring a hole experiences a maximum energy barrier for transport equal to t(2)/U, t the nearest-neighbor hopping integral and U the on-site repulsion. The resultant pseudogap cannot vanish before each lattice site, on average, has at least one hole as a near neighbor. The ubiquity of this effect in all doped Mott insulators suggests that the pseudogap in the cuprates has a simple origin.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers University, 136 Frelinghuysen Road, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854-8019, USA.
authors.forename: Tudor D
authors.initials: TD
authors.lastname: Stanescu
authors.forename: Philip
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Phillips