Renormalization of quasiparticle hopping integrals by spin interactions in layered copper oxides

Holes doped within the square $\mathrm{Cu}{\mathrm{O}}_{2}$ network specific to the cuprate superconducting materials have oxygen $2p$ character. We investigate the basic properties of such oxygen holes by wave-function-based quantum chemical calculations on large embedded clusters. We find that a $2p$ hole induces ferromagnetic correlations among the nearest-neighbor $\mathrm{Cu}\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}3d$ spins. When moving through the antiferromagnetic background, the hole must bring along this spin-polarization cloud at nearby Cu sites, which gives rise to a substantial reduction of the effective hopping parameters. Such interactions can explain the relatively low values inferred for the effective hoppings by fitting the angle-resolved photoemission data. The effect of the background antiferromagnetic couplings of renormalizing the effective nearest-neighbor hopping is also confirmed by density-matrix renormalization-group model-Hamiltonian calculations for chains and ladders of $\mathrm{Cu}{\mathrm{O}}_{4}$ plaquettes.