No Arabic abstract
We investigate the electronic structure and the hole content in the copper-oxygen planes of Hg based high Tc cuprates for one to four CuO2 layers and hydrostatic pressures up to 15 GPa. We find that with the pressure-induced additional number of holes of the order of 0.05e the density of states at the Fermi level changes approximately by a factor of 2. At the same time the saddle point is moved to the Fermi level accompanied by an enhanced k_z dispersion. This finding explains the pressure behavior of Tc and leads to the conclusion that the applicability of the van Hove scenario is restricted. By comparison with experiment, we estimate the coupling constant to be of the order of 1, ruling out the weak coupling limit.
The superconducting phase of the $mathrm{HgBa}_2mathrm{CuO}_{4+delta}$ (Hg-1201) and $mathrm{HgBa}_2mathrm{Ca}_2mathrm{Cu}_3mathrm{O}_{8+delta}$ (Hg-1223) cuprates has been investigated by Raman spectroscopy under hydrostatic pressure. Our analysis reveals that the increase of $T_c$ with pressure is slower in Hg-1223 cuprate compared to the Hg-1201 due to a charge carrier concentration imbalance (accentuated by pressure) between the $mathrm{CuO}_2$ layers of Hg-1223. We find that the energy variation under pressure of the apical oxygen mode from which the charge carriers are transferred to the $mathrm{CuO}_2$ layers, is the same for both the Hg-1223 and Hg-1223 cuprates and it is controlled by the inter-layer compressibility. At last, we show that the binding energy of the Cooper pairs related to the maximum amplitude of the $d-$ wave superconducting gap at the anti-nodes, does not follow $T_c$ with pressure. It decreases while $T_c$ increases. In the particular case of Hg-1201, the binding energy collapses from 10 to 2 $K_B T_c$ as the pressure increases up to 10 GPa. These direct spectroscopic observations joined to the fact that the binding energy of the Cooper pairs at the anti-nodes does not follow $T_c$ either with doping, raises the question of its link with the pseudogap energy scale which follows the same trend with doping.
Using first principles calculations, we analyze structural and magnetic trends as a function of charge doping and pressure in BaFe$_2$As$_2$, and compare to experimentally established facts. We find that density functional theory, while accurately reproducing the structural and magnetic ordering at ambient pressure, fails to reproduce some structural trends as pressure is increased. Most notably, the Fe-As bondlength which is a gauge of the magnitude of the magnetic moment, $mu$, is rigid in experiment, but soft in calculation, indicating residual local Coulomb interactions. By calculating the magnitude of the magnetic ordering energy, we show that the disruption of magnetic order as a function of pressure or doping can be qualitatively reproduced, but that in calculation, it is achieved through diminishment of $|mu|$, and therefore likely does not reflect the same physics as detected in experiment. We also find that the strength of the stripe order as a function of doping is strongly site-dependent: magnetism decreases monotonically with the number of electrons doped at the Fe site, but increases monotonically with the number of electrons doped at the Ba site. Intra-planar magnetic ordering energy (the difference between checkerboard and stripe orderings) and interplanar coupling both follow a similar trend. We also investigate the evolution of the orthorhombic distortion, $e=(a-b)/(a+b),$ as a function of $mu$, and find that in the regime where experiment finds a linear relationship, our calculations are impossible to converge, indicating that in density functional theory, the transition is first order, signalling anomalously large higher order terms in the Landau functional.
The increased transmission, observed in the EXAFS region of their X-ray absorption spectra, as cuprate materials go through the superconducting transition temperature Tc is correlated with an increase in Abrikosov Vortex expulsion in zero magnetic field as the temperature T approaches Tc.
Starting from a spin-fermion model for the cuprate superconductors, we obtain an effective interaction for the charge carriers by integrating out the spin degrees of freedom. Our model predicts a quantum critical point for the superconducting interaction coupling, which sets up a threshold for the onset of superconductivity in the system. We show that the physical value of this coupling is below this threshold, thus explaining why there is no superconducting phase for the undoped system. Then, by including doping, we find a dome-shaped dependence of the critical temperature as charge carriers are added to the system, in agreement with the experimental phase diagram. The superconducting critical temperature is calculated without adjusting any free parameter and yields, at optimal doping $ T_c sim $ 45 K, which is comparable to the experimental data.
High-temperature cuprate superconductors have been known to exhibit significant pressure effects. In order to fathom the origin of why and how Tc is affected by pressure, we have recently studied the pressure effects on Tc adoptig a model that contains two cupper d-orbitals derived from first-principles band calculations, where the dz2 orbital is considere on top of the usually considered dx2-y2 orbital. In that paper, we have identified two origins for the Tc enhancement under hydrostatic pressure: (i) while at ambient pressure the smaller the hybridization of other orbital components the higher the Tc, an application of pressure acts to reduce the multiorbital mxing on the Fermi surface, which we call the orbital distillation effects, and (ii) the increase of the band width with pressure also contributes to the enhancement. In the present paper, we further elabolrate the two points. As for point (i), while the reduction of the apical oxygen height under pressure tends to increase the dz2 mixture, hence to lower Tc, here we show that this effect is strongly reduced in bi-layer materials due to the pyramidal coordination of oxygen atoms. As for point (ii), we show that the enhancement of Tc due to the increase in the band width is caused by the effect that the many-body renormalization arising from the self-energy is reduced.