On the Origin of the Tunneling Asymmetry in the Cuprate Superconductors

We argue the coherent part of the spectral weight always contribute symmetrically to the STM spectrum at sufficiently low energy and the tunneling asymmetry is a manifestation of the incoherent part of the electron spectrum. By subtracting the particle side spectrum from the hole side spectrum in the published STM data of Pan \textit{et al} on $BSCCO_{2212}(T_{c}=84K)$, we find the difference spectrum show a well defined gap structure at 25 meV. We argue this gap may represent a new energy scale of the system, namely the energy scale for spin-charge recombination in this system.