No Arabic abstract
Spin-orbit coupling has been conjectured to play a key role in the low-energy electronic structure of Sr2RuO4. Using circularly polarized light combined with spin- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, we directly measure the value of the effective spin-orbit coupling to be 130 +/- 30 meV. This is even larger than theoretically predicted and comparable to the energy splitting of the dxy and dxz,yz orbitals around the Fermi surface, resulting in a strongly momentum-dependent entanglement of spin and orbital character. As demonstrated by the spin expectation value obtained for a pair of electrons with zero total momentum, the classification of the Cooper pairs in terms of pure singlets or triplets fundamentally breaks down, necessitating a description of the unconventional superconducting state of Sr2RuO4 in terms of these newly found spin-orbital entangled eigenstates.
Using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy it is revealed that in the vicinity of optimal doping the electronic structure of La2-xSrxCuO4 cuprate undergoes an electronic reconstruction associated with a wave vector q_a=(pi, 0). The reconstructed Fermi surface and folded band are distinct to the shadow bands observed in BSCCO cuprates and in underdoped La2-xSrxCuO4 with x <= 0.12, which shift the primary band along the zone diagonal direction. Furthermore the folded bands appear only with q_a=(pi, 0) vector, but not with q_b= (0, pi). We demonstrate that the absence of q_b reconstruction is not due to the matrix-element effects in the photoemission process, which indicates the four-fold symmetry is broken in the system.
We report high resolution ARPES measurements of detwinned FeSe single crystals. The application of a mechanical strain is used to promote the volume fraction of one of the orthorhombic domains in the sample, which we estimate to be 80$%$ detwinned. While the full structure of the electron pockets consisting of two crossed ellipses may be observed in the tetragonal phase at temperatures above 90~K, we find that remarkably, only one peanut-shaped electron pocket oriented along the longer $a$ axis contributes to the ARPES measurement at low temperatures in the nematic phase, with the expected pocket along $b$ being not observed. Thus the low temperature Fermi surface of FeSe as experimentally determined by ARPES consists of one elliptical hole pocket and one orthogonally-oriented peanut-shaped electron pocket. Our measurements clarify the long-standing controversies over the interpretation of ARPES measurements of FeSe.
Despite many ARPES investigations of iron pnictides, the structure of the electron pockets is still poorly understood. By combining ARPES measurements in different experimental configurations, we clearly resolve their elliptic shape. Comparison with band calculation identify a deep electron band with the dxy orbital and a shallow electron band along the perpendicular ellipse axis with the dxz/dyz orbitals. We find that, for both electron and hole bands, the lifetimes associated with dxy are longer than for dxz/dyz. This suggests that the two types of orbitals play different roles in the electronic properties and that their relative weight is a key parameter to determine the ground state.
We investigated the low-energy incommensurate (IC) magnetic fluctuations in Sr$_2$RuO$_4$ by the high-resolution inelastic neutron scattering measurements and random phase approximation (RPA) calculations. We observed a spin resonance with energy of $hbaromega_text{res}=0.56$~meV centered at a characteristic wavevector $mathbf{Q}_text{res}=(0.3, 0.3, 0.5)$. The resonance energy corresponds well to the superconducting gap $2Delta=0.56$~meV estimated by the tunneling spectroscopy. The spin resonance shows the $L$ modulation with a maximum at around $L = 0.5$. The $L$ modulated intensity of the spin resonance and our RPA calculations indicate that the superconducting gaps regarding the quasi-one-dimensional $alpha$ and $beta$ sheets at the Fermi surfaces have the horizontal line nodes. These results may set a strong constraint on the pairing symmetry of Sr$_2$RuO$_4$. We also discuss the implications on possible superconducting order parameters.
The improved resolution of laser-based angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) allows reliable access to fine structures in the spectrum. We present a systematic, doping-dependent study of a recently discovered low-energy kink in the nodal dispersion of Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+d (Bi-2212), which demonstrates the ubiquity and robustness of this kink in underdoped Bi-2212. The renormalization of the nodal velocity due to this kink becomes stronger with underdoping, revealing that the nodal Fermi velocity is non-universal, in contrast to assumed phenomenology. This is used together with laser-ARPES measurements of the gap velocity, v2, to resolve discrepancies with thermal conductivity measurements.