Effects of charge inhomogeneities on elementary excitations in La _2-xSr _xCuO ₄

Purely local experimental probes of many copper oxide superconductors show that their electronic states are inhomogeneous in real space. For example, scanning tunneling spectroscopic imaging shows strong variations in real space, and according to nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) studies, the charge distribution in the bulk varies on the nanoscale. However, the analysis of the experimental results utilizing spatially averaged probes often ignores this fact. We have performed a detailed investigation of the doping dependence of the energy and linewidth of the zone-boundary Cu-O bond-stretching vibration in La _2-xSr _xCuO ₄ by inelastic neutron scattering. Both our results as well as previously reported angle-dependent momentum widths of the electronic spectral function detected by angle-resolved photoemission can be reproduced by including the same distribution of local environments extracted from the NQR analysis.