No Arabic abstract
Upper critical field, H_c2, in quasi-1D superconductors is investigated by the weak coupling renormalization group technique. It is shown that H_c2 greatly exceeds not only the Pauli limit, but also the conventional paramagnetic limit of the Flude-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) state. This increase is mainly due to quasi-1D fluctuations effect as triggered by interference between unconventional superconductivity and density-wave instabilities. Our results give a novel viewpoint on the large H_c2 observed in TMTSF-salts in terms of a d-wave FFLO state that is predicted to be verified by the H_c2 measurements under pressure.
The transition temperature Tc of cuprate superconductors falls when the doping p is reduced below a certain optimal value. It is unclear whether this fall is due to strong phase fluctuations or to a decrease in the pairing gap. Different interpretations of photoemission data disagree on the evolution of the pairing gap and different estimates of the upper critical field Hc2 are in sharp contradiction. Here we resolve this contradiction by showing that superconducting fluctuations in the underdoped cuprate Eu-LSCO, measured via the Nernst effect, have a characteristic field scale that falls with underdoping. The critical field Hc2 dips at p = 0.11, showing that superconductivity is weak where stripe order is strong. In the archetypal cuprate superconductor YBCO, Hc2 extracted from other measurements has the same doping dependence, also with a minimum at p = 0.11, again where stripe order is present. We conclude that competing states such as stripe order weaken superconductivity and this, rather than phase fluctuations, causes Tc to fall as cuprates become underdoped.
We present the first study of codoped iron-arsenide superconductors of the 122 family (Sr/Ba)_(1-x)K_xFe_(2-y)Co_yAs_2 with the purpose to increase the upper critical field H_c2 compared to single doped (Sr/Ba)Fe_2As_2 materials. H_c2 was investigated by measuring the magnetoresistance in high pulsed magnetic fields up to 64 T. We find, that H_c2 extrapolated to T = 0 is indeed enhanced significantly to ~ 90 T for polycrystalline samples of Ba_0.55K_0.45Fe_1.95Co_0.05As_2 compared to ~75 T for Ba_0.55K_0.45Fe_2As_2 and BaFe_1.8Co_0.2As_2 single crystals. Codoping thus is a promising way for the systematic optimization of iron-arsenic based superconductors for magnetic-field and high-current applications.
Fluctuations around an antiferromagnetic quantum critical point (QCP) are believed to lead to unconventional superconductivity and in some cases to high-temperature superconductivity. However, the exact mechanism by which this occurs remains poorly understood. The iron-pnictide superconductor BaFe$_2$(As$_{1-x}$P$_x$)$_2$ is perhaps the clearest example to date of a high temperature quantum critical superconductor, and so it is a particularly suitable system in which to study how the quantum critical fluctuations affect the superconducting state. Here we show that the proximity of the QCP yields unexpected anomalies in the superconducting critical fields. We find that both the lower and upper critical fields strongly violate the expectations from the conventional theory taking into account the observed mass enhancement near the QCP. These anomalous behaviours of the critical fields imply that the energy of superconducting vortices is enhanced, possibly due to a microscopic mixing of antiferromagnetism and superconductivity, suggesting that a highly unusual vortex state is realised in quantum critical superconductors.
When a second-order magnetic phase transition is tuned to zero temperature by a non-thermal parameter, quantum fluctuations are critically enhanced, often leading to the emergence of unconventional superconductivity. In these `quantum critical superconductors it has been widely reported that the normal-state properties above the superconducting transition temperature $T_c$ often exhibit anomalous non-Fermi liquid behaviors and enhanced electron correlations. However, the effect of these strong critical fluctuations on the superconducting condensate below $T_c$ is less well established. Here we report measurements of the magnetic penetration depth in heavy-fermion, iron-pnictide, and organic superconductors located close to antiferromagnetic quantum critical points showing that the superfluid density in these nodal superconductors universally exhibit, unlike the expected $T$-linear dependence, an anomalous 3/2 power-law temperature dependence over a wide temperature range. We propose that this non-integer power-law can be explained if a strong renormalization of effective Fermi velocity due to quantum fluctuations occurs only for momenta $bm{k}$ close to the nodes in the superconducting energy gap $Delta(bm{k})$. We suggest that such `nodal criticality may have an impact on low-energy properties of quantum critical superconductors.
Recent high-precision measurements employing different experimental techniques have unveiled an anomalous peak in the doping dependence of the London penetration depth which is accompanied by anomalies in the heat capacity in iron-pnictide superconductors at the optimal composition associated with the hidden antiferromagnetic quantum critical point. We argue that finite temperature effects can be a cause of observed features. Specifically we show that quantum critical magnetic fluctuations under superconducting dome can give rise to a nodal-like temperature dependence of both specific heat and magnetic penetration depth in a fully gapped superconductor. In the presence of line nodes in the superconducting gap fluctuations can lead to the significant renormalization of the relative slope of $T$-linear penetration depth which is steepest at the quantum critical point. The results we obtain are general and can be applied beyond the model we use.