Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userTranslational Symmetry Breaking in the Superconducting State of the Cuprates: Analysis of the Quasiparticle Density of States
141
0
0.0
(
0
)
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
Motivated by the recent STM experiments of J.E. Hoffman et.al. and C. Howald et.al., we study the effects of weak translational symmetry breaking on the quasiparticle spectrum of a d-wave superconductor. We develop a general formalism to discuss periodic charge order, as well as quasiparticle scattering off localized defects. We argue that the STM experiments in $Bi_2Sr_2CaCu_2O_{8+delta}$ cannot be explained using a simple charge density wave order parameter, but are consistent with the presence of a periodic modulation in the electron hopping or pairing amplitude. We review the effects of randomness and pinning of the charge order and compare it to the impurity scattering of quasiparticles. We also discuss implications of weak translational symmetry breaking for ARPES experiments.
rate research
Read More
The thermal conductivity kappa of the heavy-fermion metal CeCoIn5 was measured in the normal and superconducting states as a function of temperature T and magnetic field H, for a current and field parallel to the [100] direction. Inside the superconducting state, when the field is lower than the upper critical field Hc2, kappa/T is found to increase as T approaches absolute zero, just as in a metal and in contrast to the behavior of all known superconductors. This is due to unpaired electrons on part of the Fermi surface, which dominate the transport above a certain field. The evolution of kappa/T with field reveals that the electron-electron scattering (or transport mass m^*) of those unpaired electrons diverges as H approaches Hc2 from below, in the same way that it does in the normal state as H approaches Hc2 from above. This shows that the unpaired electrons sense the proximity of the field-tuned quantum critical point of CeCoIn5 at H^* = Hc2 even from inside the superconducting state. The fact that the quantum critical scattering of the unpaired electrons is much weaker than the average scattering of all electrons in the normal state reveals a k-space correlation between the strength of pairing and the strength of scattering, pointing to a common mechanism, presumably antiferromagnetic fluctuations.
The one-particle spectral function of a state formed by superconducting (SC) clusters is studied via Monte Carlo techniques. The clusters have similar SC amplitudes but randomly distributed phases. This state is stabilized by the competition with anti-ferromagnetism, after quenched disorder is introduced. Fermi arcs between the critical temperature Tc and the cluster formation temperature scale T* are observed, similarly as in the pseudo-gap state of the cuprates. The arcs originate at metallic regions in between the neighboring clusters that present large SC phase differences.
We apply the recent wavepacket formalism developed by Ossadnik to describe the origin of the short range ordered pseudogap state as the hole doping is lowered through a critical density in cuprates. We argue that the energy gain that drives this precursor state to Mott localization, follows from maximizing umklapp scattering near the Fermi energy. To this end we show how energy gaps driven by umklapp scattering can open on an appropriately chosen surface, as proposed earlier by Yang, Rice and Zhang. The key feature is that the pairing instability includes umklapp scattering, leading to an energy gap not only in the single particle spectrum but also in the pair spectrum. As a result the superconducting gap at overdoping is turned into an insulating pseudogap, in the antinodal parts of the Fermi surface.
The heavy-fermion superconductor CeCoIn$_5$ displays an additional transition within its superconducting (SC) state, whose nature is characterized by high-precision studies of the isothermal field dependence of the entropy, derived from combined specific heat and magnetocaloric effect measurements at temperatures $Tgeq 100$ mK and fields $Hleq 12$ T aligned parallel, perpendicular and $18^circ$ off the tetragonal [100] direction. For any of these conditions, we do not observe an additional entropy contribution upon tuning at constant temperature by magnetic field from the homogeneous SC into the presumed Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) SC state. By contrast, for $Hparallel [100]$ a negative isothermal entropy contribution, compatible with spin-density-wave (SDW) ordering, is found. Our data exclude the formation of a FFLO state in CeCoIn$_5$ for out-of-plane field directions, where no SDW order exists.
The microscopical analysis of the unconventional and puzzling physics of the underdoped cuprates, as carried out lately by means of the Composite Operator Method (COM) applied to the 2D Hubbard model, is reviewed and systematized. The 2D Hubbard model has been adopted as it has been considered the minimal model capable to describe the most peculiar features of cuprates held responsible for their anomalous behavior. COM is designed to endorse, since its foundations, the systematic emergence in any SCS of new elementary excitations described by composite operators obeying non-canonical algebras. In this case (underdoped cuprates - 2D Hubbard model), the residual interactions - beyond a 2-pole approximation - between the new elementary electronic excitations, dictated by the strong local Coulomb repulsion and well described by the two Hubbard composite operators, have been treated within the Non Crossing Approximation. Given this recipe and exploiting the few unknowns to enforce the Pauli principle content in the solution, it is possible to qualitatively describe some of the anomalous features of high-Tc cuprate superconductors such as large vs. small Fermi surface dichotomy, Fermi surface deconstruction (appearance of Fermi arcs), nodal vs. anti-nodal physics, pseudogap(s), kinks in the electronic dispersion. The resulting scenario envisages a smooth crossover between an ordinary weakly-interacting metal sustaining weak, short-range antiferromagnetic correlations in the overdoped regime to an unconventional poor metal characterized by very strong, long-but-finite-range antiferromagnetic correlations leading to momentum-selective non-Fermi liquid features as well as to the opening of a pseudogap and to the striking differences between the nodal and the anti-nodal dynamics in the underdoped regime.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
