Rotational meson states in the 2D t-J model

It's been a long-shought idea that the charge carriers in doped antiferromagnetic (AFM) Mott insulators can be understood as composites of emergent partons —  in direct analogy with the composition of baryons and mesons from quarks. In a recent  work we propose a rotational variant of angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) which allow to impart angular momentum into a lattice system. Our numerical simulations demonstrate that the rortational ARPES spectrum shows pronounced and long-lived rotational quasiparticle peaks at non-zero angular momentum. Their excitation energy depens on the string tension, characterizing the parton potential, in a universal way, as in Regge trajectories known from particle physics. Our numerical results provide the most definite proof yet for the existence of emergent mesons in doped Mott insulators, with potential implications for understanding the mechnism underlying high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates.