Theory of reduced superfluid density in underdoped cuprate superconductors

Journals published by the American Physical Society can be found at http://journals.aps.org/The critical temperature of an underdoped cuprate superconductor is limited by its phase stiffness rho. In this paper we argue that the dependence of rho on doping x should be understood as a consequence of deleterious competition with antiferromagnetism at large electron densities, rather than as evidence for pairing of holes in the x=0 Mott insulator state. rho is suppressed at small x because the correlation energy of a d-wave superconductor has a significant pairing-wave-vector dependence when antiferromagnetic fluctuations are strong