Fermi Surfaces, Fermi Patches, and Fermi Arcs in High Tc Superconductors

A defining property of metals is the existence of a Fermi surface: for two dimensions, a continuous contour in momentum space which separates occupied from unoccupied states. In this paper, I discuss angle resolved photoemission data on the cuprate superconductor BSCCO and argue that it is not best thought of in this conventional picture. Rather, the data are consistent with patches'' of finite area connected by more conventional arcs’'. Novel physics is associated with the patches, in that the states contained in a patch are dispersionless and thus interaction dominated. In the pseudogap phase, the patches are gapped out, leaving the Fermi arcs disconnected. This unusual situation may be the key to understanding the microscopic physics of the high temperature superconductors, in that the pairing correlations are strongest in the patches, yet the superfluid density lives only on the arcs.