Degenerate plaquette physics as key ingredient of high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates
We study the physics of high-temperature cuprate superconductors starting from the highly degenerate four-site plaquette of the t− t′− U Hubbard model as a reference system. The degeneracy causes strong fluctuations when a lattice of plaquettes is constructed. We show that there is a large binding energy between holes when a set of four plaquettes is considered. The next-nearest-neighbour hopping