No Arabic abstract
In high-temperature cuprate superconductors, superconductivity is accompanied by a plethora of orders, and phenomena that may compete, or cooperate with superconductivity, but which certainly complicate our understanding of origins of superconductivity in these materials. While prominent in the underdoped regime, these orders are known to significantly weaken or completely vanish with overdoping. Here, we approach the superconducting phase from the more conventional highly overdoped side. We present angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) studies of Bi$_2$Sr$_2$CaCu$_2$O$_{8+delta}$ (Bi2212) single crystals cleaved and annealed in ozone to increase the doping all the way to the metallic, non-superconducting phase. We show that the mass renormalization in the antinodal region of the Fermi surface, associated with the structure in the quasiparticle self-energy, that possibly reflects the pairing interaction, monotonically weakens with increasing doping and completely disappears precisely where superconductivity disappears. This is the direct evidence that in the overdoped regime, superconductivity is determined by the coupling strength. A strong doping dependence and an abrupt disappearance above the transition temperature ($T_{mathrm c}$) eliminate the conventional phononic mechanism of the observed mass renormalization and identify the onset of spin-fluctuations as its likely origin.
Fluctuating superconductivity - vestigial Cooper pairing in the resistive state of a material - is usually associated with low dimensionality, strong disorder or low carrier density. Here, we report single particle spectroscopic, thermodynamic and magnetic evidence for persistent superconducting fluctuations in heavily hole-doped cuprate superconductor Bi$_2$Sr$_2$CaCu$_2$O$_{8+delta}$ ($T_c$ = 66~K) despite the high carrier density. With a sign-problem free quantum Monte Carlo calculation, we show how a partially flat band at ($pi$,0) can help enhance superconducting phase fluctuations. Finally, we discuss the implications of an anisotropic band structure on the phase-coherence-limited superconductivity in overdoped cuprates and other superconductors.
In cuprate superconductors, the doping of carriers into the parent Mott insulator induces superconductivity and various other phases whose characteristic temperatures are typically plotted versus the doping level $p$. In most materials, $p$ cannot be determined from the chemical composition, but it is derived from the superconducting transition temperature, $T_mathrm{c}$, using the assumption that $T_mathrm{c}$ dependence on doping is universal. Here, we present angle-resolved photoemission studies of Bi$_2$Sr$_2$CaCu$_2$O$_{8+delta}$, cleaved and annealed in vacuum or in ozone to reduce or increase the doping from the initial value corresponding to $T_mathrm{c}=91$ K. We show that $p$ can be determined from the underlying Fermi surfaces and that $in-situ$ annealing allows mapping of a wide doping regime, covering the superconducting dome and the non-superconducting phase on the overdoped side. Our results show a surprisingly smooth dependence of the inferred Fermi surface with doping. In the highly overdoped regime, the superconducting gap approaches the value of $2Delta_0=(4pm1)k_mathrm{B}T_mathrm{c}$
The effects of structural supermodulation with the period $lambda approx26$ AA along the $b$-axis of Bi$_2$Sr$_2$CaCu$_2$O$_{8+delta}$ have been observed in photoemission studies from the early days as the presence of diffraction replicas of the intrinsic electronic structure. Although predicted to affect the electronic structure of the Cu-O plane, the influence of supermodulation potential on Cu-O electrons has never been observed in photoemission. In the present study, we clearly see, for the first time, the effects on the Bi$_2$Sr$_2$CaCu$_2$O$_{8+delta}$ electronic structure - we observe a hybridization of the intrinsic bands with the supermodulation replica bands in the form of avoided crossings and a corresponding reconstruction of the Fermi surface. We estimate the hybridization gap, $2Delta_hsim25$ meV in the slightly underdoped samples. The hybridization weakens with doping and the anti-crossing can no longer be resolved in strongly overdoped samples. In contrast, the shadow replica, shifted by $(pi, pi)$, is found not to hybridize with the original bands within our detection limits.
Mixing of topological states with superconductivity could result in topological superconductivity with the elusive Majorana fermions potentially applicable in fault-tolerant quantum computing. One possible candidate considered for realization of topological superconductivity is thin bismuth films on Bi$_2$Sr$_2$CaCu$_2$O$_{8+delta}$ (Bi2212). Here, we present angle-resolved and core-level photoemission spectroscopy studies of thin Bi films grown {it in-situ} on as-grown Bi2212 that show the absence of proximity effect. We find that the electron transfer from the film to the substrate and the resulting severe underdoping of Bi2212 at the interface is a likely origin for the absence of proximity effect. We also propose a possible way of preventing a total loss of proximity effect in this system. Our results offer a better and more universal understanding of the film/cuprate interface and resolve many issues related to the proximity effect.
Low magnetic field scanning tunneling spectroscopy of individual Abrikosov vortices in heavily overdoped Bi$_2$Sr$_2$CaCu$_2$O$_{8+delta}$ unveils a clear d-wave electronic structure of the vortex core, with a zero-bias conductance peak at the vortex center that splits with increasing distance from the core. We show that previously reported unconventional electronic structures, including the low energy checkerboard charge order in the vortex halo and the absence of a zero-bias conductance peak at the vortex center, are direct consequences of short inter-vortex distance and consequent vortex-vortex interactions prevailing in earlier experiments.