Bosons, gauge fields, and high-Tc cuprates

A simple model of a degenerate two-dimensional Bose liquid interacting with a fluctuating gauge field is investigated as a possible candidate to describe the charge degree of freedom in the normal state of the cuprate superconductors. We show that the fluctuating gauge field destroys superfluidity even in the Bose degenerate regime. We discuss the nature of the resulting normal state in terms of the geometric properties of the imaginary-time paths of the bosons. We will also present numerical results on the transport properties and the density correlations in the system. We find a transport scattering rate of the order of 2T, consistent with experiments on the optimally-doped cuprates. We also find that the density correlations of our model resemble the charge correlations of the t-J model.