Projected wavefunctions for high temperature superconductors: comparisons between theory and experiments

We show that a large amount of superconducting state data for the high Tc cuprates can be qualitatively and semi-quantitatively understood through a variational approach to strongly correlated d-wave superconductivity in a doped Mott insulator. We find that pairing and phase coherence show qualitatively different trends as a function of doping: the pairing scale decreases monotonically with hole doping x while the order parameter shows a non-monotonic 'dome'. We obtain detailed results for the doping-dependences of various quantities including the momentum distribution, nodal quasiparticle weights and dispersions, optical spectral weight, and superfluid density, which we compare with experiments