No Arabic abstract
We report an angle-resolved photoemission study of a series of hole and electron doped iron-based superconductors, their parent compound BaFe2As2, and their cousins BaCr2As2 and BaCo2As2. We focus on the energy (E) dependent scattering rate Gamma(E) as a function of the 3d count and on the renormalization function Z(E) of the inner hole pocket, which is the hot spot in these compounds. We obtain a non-Fermi-liquid-like linear in energy scattering rate Gamma(E>> kBT), independent of the dopant concentration. The main result is that the slope beta=Gamma(E >> kBT)/E, reaches its maxima near optimal doping and scales with the superconducting transition temperature. This supports the spin fluctuation model for superconductivity for these materials. In the optimally hole-doped compound, the slope of the scattering rate of the inner hole pocket is about three times bigger than the Planckian limit Gamma(E)/E~1. This result together with the energy dependence of the renormalization function Z(E) signals very incoherent charge carriers in the normal state which transform at low temperatures to a coherent unconventional superconducting state.
Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) is used to study the band dispersion and the quasiparticle scattering rates in two ferropnictides systems. Our ARPES results show linear-in-energy dependent scattering rates which are constant in a wide range of control parameter and which depend on the orbital character of the bands. We demonstrate that the linear energy dependence gives rise to weakly dispersing band with a strong mass enhancement when the band maximum crosses the chemical potential. In the superconducting phase the related small effective Fermi energy favors a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS),cite{Bardeen1957}-Bose-Einstein (BE),cite{Bose1924} crossover state.
Unconventional superconductivity has been discovered in a variety of doped materials, including topological insulators, semimetals and twisted bilayers. A unifying property of these systems is strong orbital hybridization, which involves pairing of states with non-trivial Bloch wave functions. In contrast to naive expectation, many of these superconductors are relatively resilient to disorder. Here we study the effects of a generic disorder on superconductivity in doped 3D Dirac systems, which serve as a paradigmatic example for the dispersion near a band crossing point. We argue that due to strong orbital hybridization, interorbital scattering processes are naturally present and must be taken into account. We calculate the reduction of the critical temperature for a variety of pairing states and scattering channels using Abrikosov-Gorkov theory. In that way, the role of disorder is captured by a single parameter $Gamma$, the pair scattering rate. This procedure is very general and can be readily applied to different band structures and disorder configurations. Our results show that interorbital scattering has a significant effect on superconductivity, where the robustness of different pairing states highly depends on the relative strength of the different interorbital scattering channels. Our analysis also reveals a protection, analogous to the Andersons theorem, of the odd-parity pairing state with total angular momentum zero (the B-phase of superfluid $^3$He). This odd-pairty state is a singlet of partners under $mathcal{CT}$ symmetry (rather than $mathcal{T}$ symmetry in the standard Andersons theory), where $mathcal{C}$ and $mathcal{T}$ are chiral and time-reversal symmetries, respectively. As a result, it is protected against any disorder potential that respects $mathcal{CT}$ symmetry, which includes a family of time-reversal odd (magnetic) impurities.
Here we report the synthesis and basic characterization of LaFe1-xCoxAsO for several values of x. The parent phase LaFeAsO orders antiferromagnetically (TN ~ 145 K). Replacing Fe with Co is expected to both electron dope the system and introduce disorder in the FeAs layer. For x = 0.05 antiferromagnetic order is destroyed and superconductivity is observed at Tconset = 11.2 K. For x = 0.11 superconductivity is observed at Tc(onset) = 14.3 K, and for x = 0.15 Tc = 6.0 K. Superconductivity is not observed for x = 0.2 and 0.5, but for x = 1, the material appears to be ferromagnetic (Tc ~ 56 K) as judged by magnetization measurements. We conclude that Co is an effective dopant to induce superconductivity. Somewhat surprisingly, the system appears to tolerate considerable disorder in the FeAs planes.
Aliovalent rare earth substitution into the alkaline earth site of CaFe2As2 single-crystals is used to fine-tune structural, magnetic and electronic properties of this iron-based superconducting system. Neutron and single crystal x-ray scattering experiments indicate that an isostructural collapse of the tetragonal unit cell can be controllably induced at ambient pressures by choice of substituent ion size. This instability is driven by the interlayer As-As anion separation, resulting in an unprecedented thermal expansion coefficient of $180times 10^{-6}$ K$^{-1}$. Electrical transport and magnetic susceptibility measurements reveal abrupt changes in the physical properties through the collapse as a function of temperature, including a reconstruction of the electronic structure. Superconductivity with onset transition temperatures as high as 47 K is stabilized by the suppression of antiferromagnetic order via chemical pressure, electron doping or a combination of both. Extensive investigations are performed to understand the observations of partial volume-fraction diamagnetic screening, ruling out extrinsic sources such as strain mechanisms, surface states or foreign phases as the cause of this superconducting phase that appears to be stable in both collapsed and uncollapsed structures.
We successfully synthesized the nickel-based compound GdONiBi with superconducting transition temperature about 4.5 K. By partially substituting the element Gd with Sr to introduce holes into the material, we got new superconductor Gd0.9Sr0.1ONiBi with critical temperature about 4.7 K. The normal state resistivity in nickel-based samples shows a metallic behavior. The magnetoresistance measurements show a different behavior compared to those in iron-based compounds which indicates that the mechanism in the two kinds of superconductors maybe different.