Theory of isotope dependence of photoemission spectra of high-Tc superconducting cuprates -: art. no. 104519

We investigate the effect of isotope substitution on the electronic spectral functions within a model where the charge carriers are coupled to bosonic charge-order (CO) fluctuations centered around some mean frequency omega(0) and with enhanced scattering at wave vector q(c). It is shown that the mass dependence of omega(0) is not sufficient to account, especially at high energies, for the dispersion shifts experimentally observed in an optimally doped superconducting cuprate. Our analysis rather suggests that isotope substitution induces a change of the spatial CO correlations which gives a good account of the experimental data.