Effects of Cooper pair tunneling on the electronic structure of trilayer cuprate superconductors Original Research Article

Recent angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) experiment on the optimally doped trilayer cuprate superconductors Bi2223 has revealed a layer variation of both doping density and d-wave gap. In particular, the two outer layers are overdoped with a gap which is larger than the gap for optimally doped single layer cuprates while the inner layer is underdoped with an even larger gap. Here we propose a minimal model composed of three layer t–J Hamiltonian, single particle interlayer tunneling as well as Cooper pair tunneling terms. By using renormalized mean field method, we study the superconducting order parameters and their dependence of tunneling parameters. Some relevant physical quantities have been calculated. Both tunneling effects influence the electronic structure of the trilayer system and their cooperative action may qualitatively explain the ARPES results.