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Bond order in two-dimensional metals with antiferromagnetic exchange interactions

We present an unrestricted Hartree-Fock computation of charge-ordering instabilities of two-dimensional metals with antiferromagnetic exchange interactions, allowing for arbitrary ordering wavevectors and internal wavefunctions of the particle-hole pair condensate. We find that the ordering has a dominant d symmetry of rotations about lattice points for a range of ordering wavevectors, including those observed in recent experiments at low temperatures on YBCO. This d symmetry implies the charge ordering is primarily on the bonds of the Cu lattice, and we propose incommensurate bond order parameters for the underdoped cuprates. The field theory for the onset of Neel order in a metal has an emergent pseudospin symmetry which `rotates' d-wave Cooper pairs to particle-hole pairs (Metlitski et al. arXiv:1005.1288): our results show that this symmetry has consequences even when the spin correlations are short-ranged and incommensurate.