No Arabic abstract
We derive analytic expressions for the critical temperatures of the superconducting (SC) and pseudogap (PG) transitions of the high-Tc cuprates as a function of doping. These are in excellent agreement with the experimental data both for single-layered materials such as LSCO, Bi2201 and Hg1201 and multi-layered ones, such as Bi2212, Bi2223, Hg1212 and Hg1223. Optimal doping occurs when the chemical potential vanishes, thus leading to an universal expression for the optimal SC transition temperatures. This allows for the obtainment of a quantitative description of the growth of such temperatures with the number of layers, N, which accurately applies to the $Bi$, $Hg$ and $Tl$ families of cuprates. We study the pressure dependence of the SC transition temperatures, obtaining excellent agreement with the experimental data for different materials and dopings. These results are obtained from an effective Hamiltonian for the itinerant oxygen holes, which includes both the electric repulsion between them and their magnetic interactions with the localized copper ions. We show that the former interaction is responsible for the SC and the latter, for the PG phases, the phase diagram of cuprates resulting from the competition of both. The Hamiltonian is defined on a bipartite oxygen lattice, which results from the fact that only the $p_x$ and $p_y$ oxygen orbitals alternatively hybridize with the $3d$ copper orbitals. From this, we can provide an unified explanation for the $d_{x^2-y^2}$ symmetry of both the SC and PG order parameters and obtain the Fermi pockets observed in ARPES experiments.
Large pulsed magnetic fields up to 60 Tesla are used to suppress the contribution of superconducting fluctuations (SCF) to the ab-plane conductivity above Tc in a series of YBa2Cu3O(6+x). These experiments allow us to determine the field Hc(T) and the temperature Tc above which the SCFs are fully suppressed. A careful investigation near optimal doping shows that Tc is higher than the pseudogap temperature T*, which is an unambiguous evidence that the pseudogap cannot be assigned to preformed pairs. Accurate determinations of the SCF contribution to the conductivity versus temperature and magnetic field have been achieved. They can be accounted for by thermal fluctuations following the Ginzburg-Landau scheme for nearly optimally doped samples. A phase fluctuation contribution might be invoked for the most underdoped samples in a T range which increases when controlled disorder is introduced by electron irradiation. Quantitative analysis of the fluctuating magnetoconductance allows us to determine the critical field Hc2(0) which is found to be be quite similar to Hc(0) and to increase with hole doping. Studies of the incidence of disorder on both Tc and T* allow us to propose a three dimensional phase diagram including a disorder axis, which allows to explain most observations done in other cuprate families.
We report simultaneous hydrostatic pressure studies on the critical temperature $T_c$ and on the pseudogap temperature $T^*$ performed through resistivity measurements on an optimally doped high-$T_c$ oxide $Hg_{0.82}Re_{0.18}Ba_2Ca_2Cu_3O_{8+delta}$. The resistivity is measured as function of the temperature for several different applied pressure below 1GPa. We find that both $T_c$ and $T^*$ increases linearly with the pressure. This result demonstrate that the well known intrinsic pressure effect on $T_c$ is also present at $T^*$ and both temperatures are originated by the same superconducting mechanism.
We report on broad-band infrared ellipsometry measurements of the c-axis conductivity of underdoped RBa_{2}Cu_{3}O_{7-d} (R=Y, Nd, and La) single crystals. Our data provide a detailed account of the spectral weight (SW) redistributions due to the normal state pseudogap (PG) and the superconducting (SC) gap. They show that these phenomena involve different energy scales, exhibit distinct doping dependencies and thus are likely of different origin. In particular, the SW redistribution in the PG state closely resembles the one of a conventional charge- or spin density wave (CDW or SDW) system.
We have studied the influence of disorder induced by electron irradiation on the Nernst effect in optimally and underdoped YBa2Cu3O(7-d) single crystals. The fluctuation regime above T_{c} expands significantly with disorder, indicating that the T_{c} decrease is partly due to the induced loss of phase coherence. In pure crystals the temperature extension of the Nernst signal is found to be narrow whatever the hole doping, contrary to data reported in the low-T_{c} cuprates families. Our results show that the presence of intrinsic disorder can explain the enhanced range of Nernst signal found in the pseudogap phase of the latter compounds.
Large pulsed magnetic fields up to 60 Tesla are used to suppress the contribution of superconducting fluctuations (SCF) to the ab-plane conductivity above Tc in a series of YBa2Cu3O6+x single crystals. The fluctuation conductivity is found to vanish nearly exponentially with temperature, allowing us to determine precisely the field Hc(T) and the temperature Tc above which the SCFs are fully suppressed. Tc is always found much smaller than the pseudogap temperature. A careful investigation near optimal doping shows that Tc is higher than the pseudogap T*, which indicates that the pseudogap cannot be assigned to preformed pairs. For nearly optimally doped samples, the fluctuation conductivity can be accounted for by gaussian fluctuations following the Ginzburg-Landau scheme. A phase fluctuation contribution might be invoked for the most underdoped samples in a T range which increases when controlled disorder is introduced by electron irradiation. Quantitative analysis of the fluctuating magnetoconductance allows us to determine the critical field Hc2(0) which is found to be quite similar to Hc(0) and to increase with hole doping. Studies of the incidence of disorder on both Tc and T* enable us to propose a three dimensional phase diagram including a disorder axis, which allows to explain most observations done in other cuprate families.