Manifestation of marginal Fermi liquid and phonon excitations in photoemission experiments of cuprate superconductors

Abstract Recent ARPES experiments in cuprates superconductors show a kink in the electron dispersion near the Fermi energy. This kink coexists with a linear frequency dependence of the imaginary part of the electron self-energy. In this paper, we show that both features could be accounted for if an electron–phonon interaction (EPHI) is included in a model where the electrons are described by a marginal Fermi liquid theory. Phonons provide the energy scale seen in the experiments but the quasi-particle weight at the Fermi level is zero. At high binding energy, in agreement with the experiment, the electron dispersion does not go to the one-electron band. We analyze the compatibility between the electron scattering rate extracted from ARPES experiment and the one extracted from transport properties. We conclude that the EPHI relevant for transport properties is strongly screened with respect to the one extracted from ARPES. This is in agreement with recent studies in the context of 1/N expansion on t–J model.