No Arabic abstract
The cuprate high-temperature superconductors (HTSC) have been the subject of intense study for more than 30 years with no consensus yet on the underlying mechanism of the superconductivity. Conventional wisdom dictates that the mysterious and extraordinary properties of the cuprates arise from doping a strongly correlated antiferromagnetic (AFM) insulator (1,2). The highly overdoped cuprates$-$those beyond the dome of superconductivity (SC)--are considered to be conventional Fermi liquid metals (3). Here, we report the emergence of itinerant ferromagnetic order (FM) below 4K for doping beyond the SC dome in electron-doped La$_{2-x} $Ce$_x$CuO$_4$ (LCCO). The existence of this FM order is evidenced by negative, anisotopic and hysteretic magnetoresistance, hysteretic magnetization, and the polar Kerr effect, all of which are standard signatures of itinerant FM in metals (4,5). This surprising new result suggests that the overdoped cuprates are also influenced by electron correlations and the physics is much richer than that of a conventional Fermi liquid metal.
We report muon spin rotation and magnetic susceptibility experiments on in-plane stress effects on the static spin-stripe order and superconductivity in the cuprate system La2-xBaxCuO4 with x = 0.115. An extremely low uniaxial stress of 0.1 GPa induces a substantial decrease in the magnetic volume fraction and a dramatic rise in the onset of 3D superconductivity, from 10 to 32 K; however, the onset of at-least-2D superconductivity is much less sensitive to stress. These results show not only that large-volume-fraction spin-stripe order is anti-correlated with 3D superconducting (SC) coherence, but also that these states are energetically very finely balanced. Moreover, the onset temperatures of 3D superconductivity and spin-stripe order are very similar in the large stress regime. These results strongly suggest a similar pairing mechanism for spin-stripe order, the spatially-modulated 2D and uniform 3D SC orders, imposing an important constraint on theoretical models.
The intrinsically hole-doped RbEuFe$_4$As$_4$ exhibits bulk superconductivity at $T_{mathrm{sc}}=36.5$ K and ferromagnetic ordering in the Eu sublattice at $T_mathrm{m}=15$ K. Here we present a hole-compensation study by introducing extra itinerant electrons via a Ni substitution in the ferromagnetic superconductor RbEuFe$_4$As$_4$ with $T_{mathrm{sc}}>T_{mathrm{m}}$. With the Ni doping, $T_{mathrm{sc}}$ decreases rapidly, and the Eu-spin ferromagnetism and its $T_{mathrm{m}}$ remain unchanged. Consequently, the system RbEu(Fe$_{1-x}$Ni$_x$)$_4$As$_4$ transforms into a superconducting ferromagnet with $T_{mathrm{m}}>T_{mathrm{sc}}$ for $0.07leq xleq0.08$. The occurrence of superconducting ferromagnets is attributed to the decoupling between Eu$^{2+}$ spins and superconducting Cooper pairs. The superconducting and magnetic phase diagram is established, which additionally includes a recovered yet suppressed spin-density-wave state.
We report on laser-excited angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) in the electron-doped cuprate Sm(1.85)Ce(0.15)CuO(4-d). The data show the existence of a nodal hole-pocket Fermi-surface both in the normal and superconducting states. We prove that its origin is long-range antiferromagnetism by an analysis of the coherence factors in the main and folded bands. This coexistence of long-range antiferromagnetism and superconductivity implies that electron-doped cuprates are two-Fermi-surface superconductors. The measured superconducting gap in the nodal hole-pocket is compatible with a d-wave symmetry.
SrTiO$_{3}$, a quantum paraelectric, becomes a metal with a superconducting instability after removal of an extremely small number of oxygen atoms. It turns into a ferroelectric upon substitution of a tiny fraction of strontium atoms with calcium. The two orders may be accidental neighbors or intimately connected, as in the picture of quantum critical ferroelectricity. Here, we show that in Sr$_{1-x}$Ca$_{x}$TiO$_{3-delta}$ ($0.002<x<0.009$, $delta<0.001$) the ferroelectric order coexists with dilute metallicity and its superconducting instability in a finite window of doping. At a critical carrier density, which scales with the Ca content, a quantum phase transition destroys the ferroelectric order. We detect an upturn in the normal-state scattering and a significant modification of the superconducting dome in the vicinity of this quantum phase transition. The enhancement of the superconducting transition temperature with calcium substitution documents the role played by ferroelectric vicinity in the precocious emergence of superconductivity in this system, restricting possible theoretical scenarios for pairing.
Effective models are constructed for a newly discovered superconductor (Nd,Sr)NiO2, which has been considered as a possible nickelate analogue of the cuprates owing to the d9 electron configuration. Estimation of the effective interaction, which turns out to require a multiorbital model that takes account of all the orbitals involved on the Fermi surface, shows that the effective interactions are significantly larger than in the cuprates. A fluctuation exchange study for the model indicates that dx2-y2-wave superconductivity is likely to occur as in the cuprates, where the transition temperature in the nickelate can be lower from the cuprates due to the larger interaction and narrower bandwidth.