title: Electronic polymers and soft-matter-like broken symmetries in underdoped cuprates.
abstract: Empirical evidence in heavy fermion, pnictide and other systems suggests that unconventional superconductivity appears associated to some form of real-space electronic order. For the cuprates, despite several proposals, the emergence of order in the phase diagram between the commensurate antiferromagnetic state and the superconducting state is not well understood. Here we show that in this regime doped holes assemble in 'electronic polymers'. Within a Monte Carlo study, we find that in clean systems by lowering the temperature the polymer melt condenses first in a smectic state and then in a Wigner crystal both with the addition of inversion symmetry breaking. Disorder blurs the positional order leaving a robust inversion symmetry breaking and a nematic order, accompanied by vector chiral spin order and with the persistence of a thermodynamic transition. Such electronic phases, whose properties are reminiscent of soft-matter physics, produce charge and spin responses in good accord with experiments.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma Sapienza, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, I-00185 Roma, Italy.|ISC-CNR, Via dei Taurini 19, I-00185 Roma, Italy.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Capati
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma Sapienza, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, I-00185 Roma, Italy.|ISC-CNR, Via dei Taurini 19, I-00185 Roma, Italy.|CNISM Unità di Roma Sapienza, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, I-00185 Roma, Italy.
authors.forename: S
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8041-3232
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Caprara
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma Sapienza, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, I-00185 Roma, Italy.|ISC-CNR, Via dei Taurini 19, I-00185 Roma, Italy.|CNISM Unità di Roma Sapienza, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, I-00185 Roma, Italy.
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Di Castro
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma Sapienza, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, I-00185 Roma, Italy.|ISC-CNR, Via dei Taurini 19, I-00185 Roma, Italy.|CNISM Unità di Roma Sapienza, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, I-00185 Roma, Italy.
authors.forename: M
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5607-7996
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Grilli
authors.affiliation: Institut für Physik, BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, PO Box 101344, 03013 Cottbus, Germany.
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Seibold
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma Sapienza, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, I-00185 Roma, Italy.|ISC-CNR, Via dei Taurini 19, I-00185 Roma, Italy.
authors.forename: J
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7426-2570
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lorenzana