No Arabic abstract
Muon-spin-relaxation (muSR) measurements have been performed for the partially Zn-substituted electron-doped high-T_c_ superconductor Pr_0.86_LaCe_0.14_Cu_1-y_Zn_y_O_4+alpha-delta_ with y=0-0.05 and the reduced oxygen content delta=0-0.09, in order to investigate nonmagnetic Zn-impurity effects on the Cu-spin dynamics. For all the measured samples with delta=0.01-0.09, it has been found that a fast depolarization of muon spins is observed below 100 K due to the effect of Pr^3+^ moments and that the muSR time spectrum in the long-time region above 5 mu-sec increases with decreasing temperature at low temperatures below 30 K possibly due to slowing down of the Cu-spin fluctuations assisted by Pr^3+^ moments. No Zn-induced slowing down of the Cu-spin fluctuations has been observed for moderately oxygen-reduced samples with delta=0.04-0.09, which is very different from the muSR results of La_2-x_Sr_x_Cu_1-y_Zn_y_O_4_. The possible reason may be that there are no dynamical stripe correlations of spins and electrons in the electron-doped high-T_c_ cuprates or that the effect of Pr^3+^ moments on the muSR spectra is stronger than that of a small amount of Zn impurities.
Muon-spin-relaxation measurements have been performed for the partially Zn-substituted La_2-x_Sr_x_Cu_1-y_Zn_y_O_4_ with y=0-0.10 in the overdoped regime up to x=0.30. In the 3 % Zn-substituted samples up to x=0.27, exponential-like depolarization of muon spins has been observed at low temperatures, indicating Zn-induced slowing-down of the Cu-spin fluctuations. The depolarization rate decreases with increasing x and almost no fast depolarization of muon spins has been observed for x=0.30 where superconductivity disappears. The present results suggest that the dynamical stripe correlations exist in the whole superconducting regime of La_2-x_Sr_x_CuO_4_ and that there is no quantum critical point at x~0.19.
In order to investigate the low-energy antiferromagnetic Cu-spin correlation and its relation to the superconductivity, we have performed muon spin relaxation (muSR) measurements using single crystals of the electron-doped high-Tc cuprate Pr_1-x_LaCe_x_CuO_4_ in the overdoped regime. The muSR spectra have revealed that the Cu-spin correlation is developed in the overdoped samples where the superconductivity appears. The development of the Cu-spin correlation weakens with increasing x and is negligibly small in the heavily overdoped sample where the superconductivity almost disappears. Considering that the Cu-spin correlation also exist in the superconducting electron-doped cuprates in the undoped and underdoped regimes [T. Adachi et al., J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. 85, 114716 (2016)], our findings suggest that the mechanism of the superconductivity is related to the low-energy Cu-spin correlation in the entire doping regime of the electron-doped cuprates.
We use inelastic neutron scattering to explore the evolution of the low energy spin dynamics in the electron-doped cuprate Pr0.88LaCe0.12CuO4-d (PLCCO) as the system is tuned from its nonsuperconducting, as-grown antiferromagnetic (AF) state into an optimally-doped superconductor (Tc~24 K) without static AF order. The low temperature, low energy response of the spin excitations in under-doped samples is coupled to the presence of the AF phase, whereas the low-energy magnetic response for samples near optimal Tc exhibits spin fluctuations surprisingly insensitive to the sample temperature. This evolution of the low energy excitations is consistent with the influence of a quantum critical point in the phase diagram of PLCCO associated with the suppression of the static AF order. We carried out scaling analysis of the data and discuss the influence of quantum critical dynamics in the observed excitation spectrum.
An antiferromagnetic (AF) spin fluctuation induced pairing model is proposed for the electron-doped cuprate superconductors. It suggests that, similar to the hole-doped side, the superconducting gap function is monotonic d_{x^2-y^2}-wave and explains why the observed gap function has a nonmonotonic d_{x^2-y^2}-wave behavior when an AF order is taken into account. Dynamical spin susceptibility is calculated and shown to be in good agreement with the experiment. This gives a strong support to the proposed model.
We present a systematic study of spin dynamics in a superconducting ground state, which itself is a doped-Mott-insulator and can correctly reduce to an antiferromagnetic (AF) state at half-filling with an AF long-range order (AFLRO). Such a doped Mott insulator is described by a mean-field theory based on the phase string formulation of the t-J model. We show that the spin wave excitation in the AFLRO state at half-filling evolves into a resonancelike peak at a finite energy in the superconducting state, which is located around the AF wave vectors. The width of such a resonancelike peak in momentum space decides a spin correlation length scale which is inversely proportional to the square root of doping concentration, while the energy of the resonancelike peak scales linearly with the doping concentration at low doping. An important prediction of the theory is that, while the total spin sum rule is satisfied at different doping concentrations, the weight of the resonancelike peak does not vanish, but is continuously saturated to the weight of the AFLRO at zero-doping limit. Besides the low-energy resonancelike peak, we also show that the high-energy excitations still track the spin wave dispersion in momentum space, contributing to a significant portion of the total spin sum rule. The fluctuational effect beyond the mean-field theory is also examined, which is related to the broadening of the resonancelike peak in energy space. In particular, we discuss the incommensurability of the spin dynamics by pointing out that its visibility is strongly tied to the low-energy fluctuations below the resonancelike peak. We finally investigate the interlayer coupling effect on the spin dynamics as a function of doping, by considering a bilayer system.