In the generalized-$tJ$ model the effect of a large local Coulomb repulsion is accounted for by restricting the Hilbert space to states with at most one electron per site. In this case the electronic system can be viewed in terms of holes hopping in a lattice of correlated spins, where holes are the carriers doped into the half-filled Mott insulator. To explicitly capture the interplay between the hole dynamics and local spin correlations we derive a formulation of the generalized-$tJ$ model where doped carrier operators are used instead of the original electron operators. This “doped carrier” formulation provides a starting point to address doped spin systems, and we use it to develop a fully fermionic, mean-field description of doped Mott insulators. This mean-field approach reveals a mechanism for superconductivity—namely, spinon-dopon mixing—and we apply it to the $t{t}^{\prime }{t}^{″}J$ model as of interest to high-temperature superconductors. In particular, we use model parameters borrowed from band calculations and from fitting angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy data to obtain a mean-field phase diagram that reproduces semiquantitatively that of hole- and electron-doped cuprates. The mean-field approach hereby presented accounts for the local antiferromagnetic and $d$-wave superconducting correlations which, we show, provide a rational for the role of $t^{\prime }$ and $t^{″}$ in strengthening superconductivity as expected by experiments and other theoretical approaches. As we discuss how $t$, $t^{\prime }$, and $t^{″}$ affect the phase diagram, we also comment on possible scenarios to understand the differences between as-grown and oxygen-reduced electron-doped samples.

• Received 9 January 2006

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.74.155113