No Arabic abstract
Chemical doping has recently become a very important strategy to induce superconductivity especially in complex compounds. Distinguished examples include Ba-doped La$_2$CuO$_4$ (the first high temperature superconductor), K-doped BaBiO$_3$, K-doped C$_{60}$ and Na$_{x}$CoO$_{2}cdot y$H$_{2}$O. The most recent example is F-doped LaFeAsO, which leads to a new class of high temperature superconductors. One notes that all the above dopants are non-magnetic, because magnetic atoms generally break superconducting Cooper pairs. In addition, the doping site was out of the (super)conducting structural unit (layer or framework). Here we report that superconductivity was realized by doping magnetic element cobalt into the (super)conducting-active Fe$_2$As$_2$ layers in LaFe$_{1-x}$Co$_{x}$AsO. At surprisingly small Co-doping level of $x$=0.025, the antiferromagnetic spin-density-wave transition in the parent compound is completely suppressed, and superconductivity with $T_csim $ 10 K emerges. With increasing Co content, $T_c$ shows a maximum of 13 K at $xsim 0.075$, and then drops to below 2 K at $x$=0.15. This result suggests essential differences between previous cuprate superconductor and the present iron-based arsenide one.
A series of 122 phase BaFe$_{2-x}$Ni$_x$As$_2$ ($x$ = 0, 0.055, 0.096, 0.18, 0.23) single crystals were grown by self flux method and a dome-like Ni doping dependence of superconducting transition temperature is discovered. The transition temperature $T_c^{on}$ reaches a maximum of 20.5 K at $x$ = 0.096, and it drops to below 4 K as $x$ $geq$ 0.23. The negative thermopower in the normal state indicates that electron-like charge carrier indeed dominates in this system. This Ni-doped system provides another example of superconductivity induced by electron doping in the 122 phase.
The possibility of p-wave pairing in superconductors has been proposed more than five decades ago, but has not yet been convincingly demonstrated. One difficulty is that some p-wave states are thermodynamically indistinguishable from s-wave, while others are very similar to d-wave states. Here we studied the self-field critical current of NdFeAs(O,F) thin films in order to extract absolute values of the London penetration depth, the superconducting energy gap, and the relative jump in specific heat at the superconducting transition temperature, and find that all the deduced physical parameters strongly indicate that NdFeAs(O,F) is a bulk p-wave superconductor. Further investigation revealed that single atomic layer FeSe also shows p-wave pairing. In an attempt to generalize these findings, we re-examined the whole inventory of superfluid density measurements in iron-based superconductors show quite generally that most of the iron-based superconductors are p-wave superconductors.
Unlike the widely studied $s$-type two-gap superconductor MgB$_2$, the chemically similar compounds ZrB$_2$ and HfB$_2$ do not superconduct above 1 K. Yet, it has been shown that small amounts of self- or extrinsic doping (in particular with vanadium), can induce superconductivity in these materials. Based on results of different macro- and microscopic measurements, including magnetometry, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), resistivity, and muon-spin rotation ($mu$SR), we present a comparative study of Zr$_{0.96}$V$_{0.04}$B$_2$ and Hf$_{0.97}$V$_{0.03}$B$_2$. Their key magnetic and superconducting features are determined and the results are considered within the theoretical framework of multiband superconductivity proposed for MgB$_2$. Detailed Fermi surface (FS) and electronic structure calculations reveal the difference between MgB$_2$ and transition-metal diborides.
We use scanning tunneling microscopy to investigate the doping dependence of quasiparticle interference (QPI) in NaFe1-xCoxAs iron-based superconductors. The goal is to study the relation between nematic fluctuations and Cooper pairing. In the parent and underdoped compounds, where four-fold rotational symmetry is broken macroscopically, the QPI patterns reveal strong rotational anisotropy. At optimal doping, however, the QPI patterns are always four-fold symmetric. We argue this implies small nematic susceptibility and hence insignificant nematic fluctuation in optimally doped iron pnictides. Since Tc is the highest this suggests nematic fluctuation is not a prerequistite for strong Cooper pairing.
From detailed angle-resolved NMR and Meissner measurements on a ferromagnetic (FM) superconductor UCoGe (T_Curie ~ 2.5 K and T_SC ~ 0.6 K), we show that superconductivity in UCoGe is tightly coupled with longitudinal FM spin fluctuations along the c axis. We found that magnetic fields along the c axis (H || c) strongly suppress the FM fluctuations and that the superconductivity is observed in the limited magnetic field region where the longitudinal FM spin fluctuations are active. These results combined with model calculations strongly suggest that the longitudinal FM spin fluctuations tuned by H || c induce the unique spin-triplet superconductivity in UCoGe. This is the first clear example that FM fluctuations are intimately related with superconductivity.