No Arabic abstract
After three decades of enormous scientific inquiry, the emergence of superconductivity in the cuprates remains an unsolved puzzle. One major challenge has been to arrive at a satisfactory understanding of the unusual metallic normal state from which the superconducting state emerges upon cooling. A second challenge has been to achieve a unified understanding of hole- and electron-doped compounds. Here we report detailed magnetoresistivity measurements for the archetypal electron-doped cuprate Nd$_{2-x}$Ce$_x$CuO$_{4+{delta}}$ that, in combination with prior data, provide crucial links between the normal and superconducting states and between the electron- and hole-doped parts of the phase diagram. The characteristics of the normal state (magnetoresistivity, quantum oscillations, and Hall coefficient) and those of the superconducting state (superfluid density and upper critical field) consistently indicate two-band (electron and hole) features and clearly point to hole-pocket-driven superconductivity in these nominally electron-doped materials. We show that the approximate Uemura scaling between the superconducting transition temperature and the superfluid density found for hole-doped cuprates also holds for the small hole component of the superfluid density in the electron-doped cuprates.
We have studied the evolution of magnetic and orbital excitations as a function of hole-doping in single crystal samples of Sr2Ir(1-x)Rh(x)O4 (0.07 < x < 0.42) using high resolution Ir L3-edge resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS). Within the antiferromagnetically ordered region of the phase diagram (x < 0.17) we observe highly dispersive magnon and spin-orbit exciton modes. Interestingly, both the magnon gap energy and the magnon bandwidth appear to increase as a function of doping, resulting in a hardening of the magnon mode with increasing hole doping. As a result, the observed spin dynamics of hole-doped iridates more closely resemble those of the electron-doped, rather than hole-doped, cuprates. Within the paramagnetic region of the phase diagram (0.17 < x < 0.42) the low-lying magnon mode disappears, and we find no evidence of spin fluctuations in this regime. In addition, we observe that the orbital excitations become essentially dispersionless in the paramagnetic phase, indicating that magnetic order plays a crucial role in the propagation of the spin-orbit exciton.
We study the quantum transition from an antiferromagnet to a superconductor in a model for electron- and hole-doped cuprates by means of a variational cluster perturbation theory approach. In both cases, our results suggest a tendency towards phase separation between a mixed antiferromagnetic-superconducting phase at low doping and a pure superconducting phase at larger doping. However, in the electron-doped case the energy scale for phase separation is an order of magnitude smaller than for hole doping. We argue that this can explain the different pseudogap and superconducting transition scales in hole- and electron-doped materials.
Motivated by recent observations of charge order in the pseudogap regime of hole-doped cuprates, we show that {it crisscrossed} stripe order can be stabilized by coherent, momentum-dependent interlayer tunneling, which is known to be present in several cuprate materials. We further describe how subtle variations in the couplings between layers can lead to a variety of stripe ordering arrangements, and discuss the implications of our results for recent experiments in underdoped cuprates.
We report magnetoresistance and Hall Effect results for electron-doped films of the high-temperature superconductor La$_{2-x}$Ce$_x$CuO$_4$ (LCCO) for temperatures from 0.7 to 45 K and magnetic fields up to 65 T. For x = 0.12 and 0.13, just below the Fermi surface reconstruction (FSR), the normal state in-plane resistivity exhibits a well-known upturn at low temperature. Our new results show that this resistivity upturn is eliminated at high magnetic field and the resistivity becomes linear-in-temperature from $sim$ 40 K down to 0.7 K. The magnitude of the linear coefficient scales with Tc and doping, as found previously [1,2] for dopings above the FSR. In addition, the normal state Hall coefficient has an unconventional field dependence for temperatures below 50K. This anomalous transport data presents a new challenge to theory and suggests that the strange metal normal state is also present in the antiferromagnetic regime.
Pr$_4$Ni$_3$O$_8$ is an overdoped analog of hole-doped layered cuprates. Here we show via ab initio calculations that Ce-doped Pr$_4$Ni$_3$O$_8$ (Pr$_3$CeNi$_3$O$_8$) has the same electronic structure as the antiferromagnetic insulating phase of parent cuprates. We find that substantial Ce-doping should be thermodynamically stable and that other 4+ cations would yield a similar antiferromagnetic insulating state, arguing this configuration is robust for layered nickelates of low enough valence. The analogies with cuprates at different $d$ fillings suggest that intermediate Ce-doping concentrations near 1/8 should be an appropriate place to search for superconductivity in these low-valence Ni oxides.