No Arabic abstract
The phase diagram of the cuprate superconductors continues to pose formidable scientific challenges. While these materials are typically viewed as doped Mott insulators, it is well known that they are Fermi liquids at high hole-dopant concentrations. It was recently demonstrated that at moderate doping, in the pseudogap region of the phase diagram, the charge carriers are also best described as Fermi liquid. Nevertheless, the relationship between the two Fermi-liquid regions and the nature of the strange-metal state at intermediate doping have remained unsolved. Here we show in the case of the model cuprate superconductor HgBa2CuO4+{delta} that the scattering rate measured by the cotangent of the Hall angle remains quadratic in temperature across the pseudogap temperature, upon entering the strange-metal state, and that it is doping-independent below optimal doping. Analysis of the published results for other cuprates reveals that this behavior is universal throughout the entire phase diagram and points to a pervasive Fermi-liquid transport scattering rate. We argue that these observations can be reconciled with other data upon considering the possibility that the pseudogap phenomenon signifies the completion of the gradual, non-uniform localization of one hole per planar CuO2 unit upon cooling.
Mechanism of unconventional superconductivity is still unknown even if more than 25 years have been passed since the discovery of high-Tc cuprate superconductors by J.G. Bednorz and K. A. Muller. Here, we explore the cuprate phase diagram by electronic Raman spectroscopy and shed light on the superconducting state in hole doped cuprates. Namely, how superconductivity and the critical temperature Tc are impacted by the pseudogap.
We report the hole doping dependencies of the pseudogap phase energy scale, $2Delta_{rm PG}$, the anti-nodal (nodal) superconducting energy scales $2Delta^{AN}_{rm SC}$ ($2Delta^{N}_{rm SC}$) and the charge density wave energy scale, $2Delta_{rm CDW}$. They have been extracted from the electronic Raman responses of distinct copper oxide families. For all the cuprates studied, we reveal universal doping dependencies which suggest that $2Delta_{rm PG}$, $2Delta^{AN}_{rm SC}$ and $2Delta_{rm CDW}$ are governed by common microscopic interactions and that these interactions become relevant well above the superconducting transition at $T_c$. In sharp contrast, $2Delta^N_{rm SC}$ tracks the doping dependence of $T_c$, appearing to be controlled by a different kind of interactions than the energy scales above.
Emergency of superconductivity at the instabilities of antiferromagnetism (AFM), spin/charge density waves has been widely recognized in unconventional superconductors. In copper-oxide superconductors, spin fluctuations play a predominant role in electron pairing with electron dopants yet composite orders veil the nature of superconductivity for hole-doped family. However, in electron-doped ones the ending point of AFM is still in controversy for different probes or its sensitivity to oxygen content. Here, by carefully tuning the oxygen content, a systematic study of Hall signal and magnetoresistivity up to 58 Tesla on optimally doped La2-xCexCuO4+-{delta} (x = 0.10) thin films identifies two characteristic temperatures at 62.5+-7.5 K and 25+-5 K. The former is quite robust whereas the latter becomes flexible with increasing magnetic field, thereby linked to two- and three-dimensional AFM, evident from the multidimensional phase diagram as a function of oxygen as well as Ce dopants. Consequently, the observation of extended AFM phase in contrast to {mu}SR probe corroborates an elevated critical doping in field, providing an unambiguous picture to understand the interactions between AFM and superconductivity.
Cuprate high-T_c superconductors on the Mott-insulating side of optimal doping (with respect to the highest T_cs) exhibit enigmatic behavior in the non-superconducting state. Near optimal doping the transport and spectroscopic properties are unlike those of a Landau-Fermi liquid. For carrier concentrations below optimal doping a pseudogap removes quasi-particle spectral weight from parts of the Fermi surface, and causes a break-up of the Fermi surface into disconnected nodal and anti-nodal sectors. Here we show that the near-nodal excitations of underdoped cuprates obey Fermi liquid behavior. Our optical measurements reveal that the dynamical relaxation rate 1/tau(omega,T) collapses on a universal function proportional to (hbar omega)^2+(1.5 pi k_B T)^2. Hints at possible Fermi liquid behavior came from the recent discovery of quantum oscillations at low temperature and high magnetic field in underdoped YBa2Cu3O6+d and YBa2Cu4O8, from the observed T^2-dependence of the DC ({omega}=0) resistivity for both overdoped and underdoped cuprates, and from the two-fluid analysis of nuclear magnetic resonance data. However, the direct spectroscopic determination of the energy dependence of the life-time of the excitations -provided by our measurements- has been elusive up to now. This observation defies the standard lore of non-Fermi liquid physics in high T_c cuprates on the underdoped side of the phase diagram.
A universal phase diagram for weakly pinned low-T$_c$ type-II superconductors is revisited and extended with new proposals. The low-temperature ``Bragg glass phase is argued to transform first into a disordered, glassy phase upon heating. This glassy phase, a continuation of the high-field equilibrium vortex glass phase, then melts at higher temperatures into a liquid. This proposal provides an explanation for the anomalies observed in the peak effect regime of 2H-NbSe$_2$ and several other low-T$_c$ materials which is independent of the microscopic mechanisms of superconductivity in these systems.