No Arabic abstract
High temperature superconductors have in common that they consist of parallel planes of copper oxide separated by layers whose composition can vary. Being ceramics, the cuprate superconductors are poor conductors above the transition temperature, T_c. Below T_c, the parallel Cu-O planes in those materials become superconducting while the layers in between stay poor conductors. Here, we ask to what extent the change in the Casimir energy that arises when the parallel Cu-O layers become superconducting could contribute to the superconducting condensation energy. Our aim here is merely to obtain an order of magnitude estimate. To this end, the material is modelled as consisting below T_c of parallel plasma sheets separated by vacuum and as without a significant Casimir effect above T_c. Due to the close proximity of the Cu-O planes the system is in the regime where the Casimir effect becomes a van der Waals type effect, dominated by contributions from TM surface plasmons propagating along the ab planes. Within this model, the Casimir energy is found to be of the same order of magnitude as the superconducting condensation energy.
Our recent study has revealed that the mixture of the dz2 orbital component into the Fermi surface suppresses Tc in the cuprates such as La2CuO4. We have also shown that applying hydrostatic pressure enhances Tc due to smaller mixing of the Cu4s component. We call these the orbital distillation effect. In our previous study, the 4s orbital was taken into account through the hoppings in the dx2-y2 sector, but here we consider a model in which of the dx2-y2, dz2 and 4s orbitals are all considered explicitly. The present study reinforces our conclusion that smaller 4s hybridization further enhances Tc.
We show that the resistivity in each phase of the High-Tc cuprates is a special case of a general expression derived from the Kubo formula. We obtain, in particular, the T-linear behavior in the strange metal (SM) and upper pseudogap (PG) phases, the pure $T^2$, Fermi liquid (FL) behavior observed in the strongly overdoped regime as well as the $T^{1+delta}$ behavior that interpolates both in the crossover. We calculate the coefficients: a) of $T$ in the linear regime and show that it is proportional to the PG temperature $T^*(x)$; b) of the $T^2$-term in the FL regime, without adjusting any parameter; and c) of the $T^{1.6}$ term in the crossover regime, all in excellent agreement with the experimental data. From our model, we are able to infer that the resistivity in cuprates is caused by the scattering of holes by excitons, which naturally form as holes are doped into the electron background.
We analyse a model where the anomalies of the bond-stretching LO phonon mode are caused by the coupling to electron dynamic response in the form of a damped oscillator and explore the possibility to reconstruct the spectrum of the latter from the phonon measurements. Preliminary estimates point to its location in the mid infrared region and we show how the required additional information can be extracted from the oxygen isotope effect on the phonon spectrum. The model predicts a significant measurable deviation from the standard value of the isotope effect even if the phonon frequency is far below the electron spectrum, provided the latter is strongly incoherent. In this regime, which corresponds to the mid infrared scenario, the phonon linewidth becomes a sensitive and informative probe of the isotope effect.
Starting from a recently proposed comprehensive theory for the high-Tc superconductivity in cuprates, we derive a general analytic expression for the planar resistivity, in the presence of an applied external magnetic field $textbf{H}$ and explore its consequences in the different phases of these materials. As an initial probe of our result, we show it compares very well with experimental data for the resistivity of LSCO at different values of the applied field. We also apply our result to Bi2201 and show that the magnetoresistivity in the strange metal phase of this material, exhibits the $H^2$ to $H$ crossover, as we move from the weak to the strong field regime. Yet, despite of that, the magnetoresistivity does not present a quadrature scaling. Remarkably, the resistivity H-field derivative does scale as a function of $frac{H}{T}$, in complete agreement with recent magneto-transport measurements made in the strange metal phase of cuprates cite{Hussey2020}. We, finally, address the issue of the $T$-power-law dependence of the resistivity of overdoped cuprates and compare our results with experimental data for Tl2201. We show that this provides a simple method to determine whether the quantum critical point associated to the pseudogap temperature $T^*(x)$ belongs to the SC dome or not.
We have studied the doping dependence of the in-plane and out-of-plane superfluid density, rho^s(0), of two monolayer high-Tc superconductors, HgBa_2CuO_{4+delta} and La_{2-x}Sr_xCuO_4, using the low frequency ac-susceptibility and the muon spin relaxation techniques. For both superconductors, rho^s(0) increases rapidly with doping in the under- and optimally doped regime and becomes nearly doping independent above a critical doping, p_c = 0.20.