Hosted by: Ivan Bozovic

Angle-resolved photoemission, in addition to tunneling, has provided key information on the cuprate pairing on the microscopic scale. In particular, in the underdoped regime, the angular dependence of the gap function Δ(θ) deviates from a pure d-wave form such that the antinodal gap value ΔAN and the nodal gap value ΔN completely diverge. On another front, ARPES has firmly established that the enigmatic Fermi arcs, i.e. normal electron excitations around the nodes, exist even below Tc. In this work, we will interpret these experiments based on the 'pairon' model [1] in which the fundamental object is a hole pair bound by its local antiferromagnetic environment on the scale of the coherence length ξAF. The pairon model agrees quantitatively with both the gap function Δ(θ) and the Fermi arcs seen at finite temperature.