No Arabic abstract
An understanding of the missing antinodal electronic excitations in the pseudogap state is essential for uncovering the physics of the underdoped cuprate high temperature superconductors. The majority of high temperature experiments performed thus far, however, have been unable to discern whether the antinodal states are rendered unobservable due to their damping, or whether they vanish due to their gapping. Here we distinguish between these two scenarios by using quantum oscillations to examine whether the small Fermi surface pocket, found to occupy only 2% of the Brillouin zone in the underdoped cuprates, exists in isolation against a majority of completely gapped density of states spanning the antinodes, or whether it is thermodynamically coupled to a background of ungapped antinodal states. We find that quantum oscillations associated with the small Fermi surface pocket exhibit a signature sawtooth waveform characteristic of an isolated two-dimensional Fermi surface pocket. This finding reveals that the antinodal states are destroyed by a hard gap that extends over the majority of the Brillouin zone, placing strong constraints on a drastic underlying origin of quasiparticle disappearance over almost the entire Brillouin zone in the pseudogap regime.
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.
Signatures of strong coupling effects in cuprate high-$T_{c}$ superconductors have been authenticated through a variety of spectroscopic probes. However, the microscopic nature of relevant excitations has not been agreed upon. Here we report on magneto-optical studies of the CuO$_{2}$ plane carrier dynamics in a prototypical high-$T_{c}$ superconductor YBa$%_{2} $Cu$_{3}$O$_{y}$ (YBCO). Infrared data are directly compared with earlier inelastic neutron scattering results by Dai textit{et al}. [Nature (London) textbf{406}, 965 (2000)] revealing a characteristic depression of the magnetic resonance in H $parallel $ textit{c} field less than 7 T. This analysis has allowed us to critically assess the role of magnetic degrees of freedom in producing strong coupling effects for YBCO system.
To fathom the mechanism of high-temperature ($T_{rm c}$) superconductivity, the dynamical vertex approximation (D$Gamma$A) is evoked for the two-dimensional repulsive Hubbard model. After showing that our results well reproduce the cuprate phase diagram with a reasonable $T_{rm c}$ and dome structure, we keep track of the scattering processes that primarily affect $T_{rm c}$. We find that local particle-particle diagrams significantly screen the bare interaction at low frequencies, which in turn suppresses antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations and hence the pairing interaction. Thus we identify dynamical vertex corrections as one of the main oppressors of $T_{rm c}$, which may provide a hint toward higher $T_{rm c}$s.
High-temperature superconductivity in iron-arsenic materials (pnictides) near an antiferromagnetic phase raises the possibility of spin-fluctuation-mediated pairing. However, the interplay between antiferromagnetic fluctuations and superconductivity remains unclear in the underdoped regime, which is closer to the antiferromagnetic phase. Here we report that the superconducting gap of the underdoped pnictides scales linearly with the transition temperature, and that a distinct pseudogap coexisting with the SC gap develops on underdoping. This pseudogap occurs on Fermi surface sheets connected by the antiferromagnetic wavevector, where the superconducting pairing is stronger as well, suggesting that antiferromagnetic fluctuations drive both the pseudogap and superconductivity. Interestingly, we found that the pseudogap and the spectral lineshape vary with the Fermi surface quasi-nesting conditions in a fashion that shares similarities with the nodal-antinodal dichotomous behaviour observed in underdoped copper oxide superconductors.
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.