Unidirectional Charge Instability of the d-Wave Resonating Valence Bond Superconductor

Starting from a uniform d-wave superconducting phase we study the energy cost due to imposed unidirectional defects with a vanishing pairing amplitude. Both renormalized mean-field theory and variational Monte Carlo calculations within the t–J model yield that the energies of inhomogeneous and uniform phases are very close to each other. This suggests that small perturbations in the microscopic Hamiltonian might lead to inhomogeneous superconducting phases in real materials as observed in recent scanning tunneling microscopy on Ca2−xNaxCuO2Cl2.