Nature of the pseudogap phase of HTSC cuprates

The pseudogap phase of HTSC cuprates is associated with the formation of a system of quantum electron-hole (EH) dimers similar to the Anderson RVB-phase. We considered the specific role of electron-lattice relaxation in the formation of metastable EH dimers in cuprates with $T$- and $T'$-structures. In the model of charge triplets and $S$ = 1 pseudospin formalism, the effective spin-pseudospin Hamiltonian of the cuprate CuO$_2$ plane is introduced. In the framework of the molecular field approximation (MFA) for the coordinate representation, the main MFA phases were found: an antiferromagnetic insulator, a charge density wave, a bosonic superconductor with $d$-symmetry of the order parameter, and two metal Fermi-phases forming the phase of the “strange” metal. We argue that the MFA can correctly reproduce all the features of the typical cuprate phase diagrams. As for typical $s$ = 1/2 quantum antiferromagnet the actually observed cuprate phases such as charge order and superconductivity reflect “physical” ground state, which is close to MFA-phases but with strongly reduced magnitudes of the local order parameters.