Signature of Preformed Pairs in Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy

We use density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) and variational exact diagonalization (VED) to calculate the single-electron removal spectral weight for the Hubbard-Holstein model at low electron densities. Tuning the strength of the electron-phonon coupling and of the Hubbard repulsion allows us to contrast the results for a liquid of polarons versus a liquid of bipolarons. The former shows spectral weight up to the Fermi energy, as expected for a metal. The latter has a gap in its spectral weight, set by the bipolaron binding energy, although this is also a (strongly correlated) metal. This difference suggests that angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy could be used to identify liquids of pre-formed pairs. Furthermore, we show that the one-dimensional liquid of incoherent bipolarons is well approximated by a "Bose sea" of bosons that are hard-core in momentum space, occupying the momenta inside the Fermi sea but otherwise noninteracting. This new proposal for a strongly correlated many-body wave function opens the way for studying various other properties of incoherent (nonsuperconducting) liquids of preformed pairs in any dimension.