No Arabic abstract
A family of titanium oxypnictide materials BaTi2Pn2O (Pn = pnictogen) becomes superconducting when a charge and/or spin density wave is suppressed. With hole doping, isovalent doping and pressure, a whole range of tuning parameters is available. We investigate how charge doping controls the superconducting transition temperature Tc. To this end, we use experimental crystal structure data to determine the electronic structure and Fermi surface evolution along the doping path. We show that a naive approach to calculating Tc via the density of states at the Fermi level and the McMillan formula systematically fails to yield the observed Tc variation. On the other hand, spin fluctuation theory pairing calculations allow us to consistently explain the Tc increase with doping. All alkali doped materials Ba1-xAxTi2Sb2O (A = Na, K, Rb) are described by a sign-changing s-wave order parameter. Susceptibilities also reveal that the physics of the materials is controlled by a single Ti 3d orbital.
Understanding the role played by broken symmetry states such as charge, spin, and orbital orders in the mechanism of emergent properties such as high-temperature superconductivity (HTSC) is a major current topic in materials research. That the order may be within one unit cell, such as nematic, was only recently considered theoretically, but its observation in the iron-pnictide and doped cuprate superconductors places it at the forefront of current research. Here we show that the recently discovered BaTi$_2$Sb$_2$O superconductor and its parent compound BaTi$_2$As$_2$O form a symmetry-breaking nematic ground state that can be naturally explained as an intra-unit-cell charge order with $d$-wave symmetry, pointing to the ubiquity of the phenomenon. These findings, together with the key structural features in these materials being intermediate between the cuprate and iron-pnictide HTSC materials, render the titanium oxypnictides an important new material system to understand the nature of nematic order and its relationship to superconductivity.
Investigating the anisotropy of superconductors permits an access to fundamental properties. Having succeeded in the fabrication of epitaxial superconducting LaFeAs(O,F) thin films we performed an extensive study of electrical transport properties. In face of multiband superconductivity we can demonstrate that a Blatter scaling of the angular dependent critical current densities can be adopted, although being originally developed for single band superconductors. In contrast to single band superconductors the mass anisotropy of LaFeAs(O,F) is temperature dependent. A very steep increase of the upper critical field and the irreversibility field can be observed at temperatures below 6K, indicating that the band with the smaller gap is in the dirty limit. This temperature dependence can be theoretically described by two dominating bands responsible for superconductivity. A pinning force scaling provides insight into the prevalent pinning mechanism and can be specified in terms of the Kramer model.
We have performed a temperature-dependent angle-integrated laser photoemission study of iron oxypnictide superconductors LaFeAsO:F and LaFePO:F exhibiting critical transition temperatures (Tcs) of 26 K and 5 K, respectively. We find that high-Tc LaFeAsO:F exhibits a temperature-dependent pseudogap-like feature extending over ~0.1 eV about the Fermi level at 250 K, whereas such a feature is absent in low-Tc LaFePO:F. We also find ~20-meV pseudogap-like features and signatures of superconducting gaps both in LaFeAsO:F and LaFePO:F. We discuss the possible origins of the unusual pseudogap-like features through comparison with the high-Tc cuprates.
We present the first comprehensive derivation of the intrinsic electronic phase diagram of the iron-oxypnictide superconductors in the normal state based on the analysis of the electrical resistivity $rho$ of both LaFeAsO$_{1-x}$F$_x$ and SmFeAsO$_{1-x}$F$_x$ for a wide range of doping. Our data give clear-cut evidence for unusual normal state properties in these new materials. In particular, the emergence of superconductivity at low doping levels is accompanied by distinct anomalous transport behavior in $rho$ of the normal state which is reminiscent of the spin density wave (SDW) signature in the parent material. At higher doping levels $rho$ of LaFeAsO$_{1-x}$F$_x$ shows a clear transition from this pseudogap-like behavior to Fermi liquid-like behavior, mimicking the phase diagram of the cuprates. Moreover, our data reveal a correlation between the strength of the anomalous features and the stability of the superconducting phase. The pseudogap-like features become stronger in SmFeAsO$_{1-x}$F$_x$ where superconductivity is enhanced and vanish when superconductivity is reduced in the doping region with Fermi liquid-like behavior.
We report systematic 57Fe-NMR and 75As-NMR/NQR studies on an underdoped sample (T_c=20 K), an optimally doped sample (T_c=28 K), and an overdoped sample (T_c=22 K) of oxygen-deficient iron (Fe)-based oxypnictide superconductor LaFeAsO_{1-y}$. A microscopic phase separation between superconducting domains and magnetic domains is shown to take place in the underdoped sample, indicating a local inhomogeneity in association with the density distribution of oxygen deficiencies. As a result, 1/T_1T in the normal state of the superconducting domain decreases significantly upon cooling at both the Fe and As sites regardless of the electron-doping level in LaFeAsO_{1-y}. On the basis of this result, we claim that $1/T_1T$ is not always enhanced by antiferromagnetic fluctuations close to an antiferromagnetic phase in the underdoped superconducting sample. This contrasts with the behavior in hole-doped Ba_{0.6}K_{0.4}Fe2As2(T_c= 38 K), which exhibits a significant increase in $1/T_1T$ upon cooling. We remark that the crucial difference between the normal-state properties of LaFeAsO_{1-y} and Ba_{0.6}K_{0.4}Fe2As2 originates from the fact that the relevant Fermi surface topologies are differently modified depending on whether electrons or holes are doped into the FeAs layers.