Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

We use angle-resolved photoemission to unravel the quasiparticle decoherence process in the high-$T_c$ cuprates. The coherent band is highly renormalized, and the incoherent part manifests itself as a nearly vertical ``dive'' in the $E$-$k$ intensity plot that approaches the bare band bottom. We find that the coherence-incoherence crossover energies in the hole- and electron-doped cuprates are quite different, but scale to their corresponding bare bandwidth. This rules out antiferromagnetic fluctuations as the main source for decoherence. We also observe the coherent band bottom at the zone center, whose intensity is strongly suppressed by the decoherence process. Consequently, the coherent band dispersion for both hole- and electron-doped cuprates is obtained, and is qualitatively consistent with the framework of Gutzwiller projection.