No Arabic abstract
The influence of room-temperature annealing on the parameters of the basal-plane electrical resistance of underdoped YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_{7-delta}$ and HoBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_{7-delta}$ single crystals in the normal and superconducting states is investigated. The form of the derivatives $drho(T)/dT$ makes it possible to determine the onset temperature of the fluctuation conductivity and indicates a nonuniform distribution of the labile oxygen. Annealing has been revealed to lead to a monotonic decrease in the oxygen deficiency, that primarily manifests itself as a decrease of the residual resistance, an increase of $T_c$, and a decrease of the Debye temperature.
In this article, I review progress towards an understanding of the normal state (in-plane) transport properties of high-$T_c$ cuprates in the light of recent developments in both spectroscopic and transport measurement techniques. Against a backdrop of mounting evidence for anisotropic single-particle lifetimes in cuprate superconductors, new results have emerged that advocate similar momentum dependence in the transport decay rate $Gamma$({bf k}). In addition, enhancement of the energy scale (up to the bare bandwidth) over which spectroscopic information on the quasiparticle response can be obtained has led to the discovery of new, unforeseen features that surprisingly, may have a significant bearing on the transport properties at the dc limit. With these two key developments in mind, I consider here whether all the ingredients necessary for a complete phenomenological description of the anomalous normal state transport properties of high-$T_c$ cuprates are now in place.
We study normal state electrical, thermoelectrical and thermal transport in polycrystalline BiS2-based compounds, which become superconducting by F doping on the O site. In particular we explore undoped LaOBiS2 and doped LaO0.5F0.5BiS2 samples, prepared either with or without high pressure annealing, in order to evidence the roles of doping and preparation conditions. The high pressure annealed sample exhibits room temperature values of resistivity ro around 5 mohmcm, Seebeck coefficient S around -20 microV/K and thermal conductivity k around 1.5 W/Km, while the Hall resistance RH is negative at all temperatures and its value is -10-8 m3/C at low temperature. The sample prepared at ambient pressure exhibits RH positive in sign and five times larger in magnitude, and S negative in sign and slightly smaller in magnitude. These results reveal a complex multiband evolution brought about by high pressure annealing. In particular, the sign inversion and magnitude suppression of RH, indicating increased electron-type carrier density in the high pressure sample, may be closely related to previous findings about change in lattice parameters and enhancement of superconducting Tc by high pressure annealing. As for the undoped sample, it exhibits the 10 times larger resistivity, 10 times larger |S| and 10 times larger |RH| than its doped counterpart, consistently with its insulating nature. Our results point out the dramatic effect of preparation conditions in affecting charge carrier density as well as structural, band and electronic parameters in these systems.
Starting from a recently proposed comprehensive theory for the high-Tc superconductivity in cuprates, we derive a general analytic expression for the planar resistivity, in the presence of an applied external magnetic field $textbf{H}$ and explore its consequences in the different phases of these materials. As an initial probe of our result, we show it compares very well with experimental data for the resistivity of LSCO at different values of the applied field. We also apply our result to Bi2201 and show that the magnetoresistivity in the strange metal phase of this material, exhibits the $H^2$ to $H$ crossover, as we move from the weak to the strong field regime. Yet, despite of that, the magnetoresistivity does not present a quadrature scaling. Remarkably, the resistivity H-field derivative does scale as a function of $frac{H}{T}$, in complete agreement with recent magneto-transport measurements made in the strange metal phase of cuprates cite{Hussey2020}. We, finally, address the issue of the $T$-power-law dependence of the resistivity of overdoped cuprates and compare our results with experimental data for Tl2201. We show that this provides a simple method to determine whether the quantum critical point associated to the pseudogap temperature $T^*(x)$ belongs to the SC dome or not.
Low temperature heat transport was used to investigate the ground state of high-purity single crystals of the lightly-doped cuprate YBa$_{2}$Cu$_{3}$O$_{6.33}$. Samples were measured on either side of the superconducting phase boundary, in both zero and applied magnetic field. We report the observation of delocalized fermionic excitations at zero energy in the non-superconducting state, which shows that the ground state of underdoped cuprates is metallic. Its low-energy spectrum appears to be similar to that of the d-wave superconductor, i.e. nodal. The insulating ground state observed in underdoped La$_{2-x}$Sr$_{x}$CuO$_4$ is attributed to the competing spin-density-wave order present in that system.
We present the optical reflectance and conductivity spectra for non-oxide antiperovskite superconductor $MgCNi_{3}$ at different temperatures. The reflectance drops gradually over a large energy scale up to 33,000 cm$^{-1}$, with the presence of several wiggles. The reflectance has slight temperature dependence at low frequency but becomes temperature independent at high frequency. The optical conductivity shows a Drude response at low frequencies and four broad absorption features in the frequency range from 600 $cm^{-1}$ to 33,000 $cm^{-1}$. We illustrate that those features can be well understood from the intra- and interband transitions between different components of Ni 3d bands which are hybridized with C 2p bands. There is a good agreement between our experimental data and the first-principle band structure calculations.