Understanding high-temperature superconductivity requires a prior knowledge of the nature of the enigmatic pseudogap metallic state, out of which the superconducting state condenses. In addition to the electronic orders involving charge degrees of fr
eedoms recently reported inside the pseudogap state, a magnetic intra-unit-cell (IUC) order was discovered in various cuprates to set in just at the pseudogap temperature, T*. In nearly optimally doped YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_{6.85}$, polarized neutron scattering measurements, carried out on two different spectrometers, reveal new features. The order is made of finite size planar domains, hardly correlated along the c-axis. At high temperature, only the out-of-plane magnetic components correlate, revealing a strong Ising anistropy, as originally predicted in the loop current model. Below T*, a correlated in-plane response develops, giving rise the apparent tilt of the magnetic moment at low temperature. The discovery of these two regimes put stringent constraints on the intrinsict nature of IUC order, tightly bound to the pseudogap physics.
Antiferromagnetic correlations have been argued to be the cause of the d-wave superconductivity and the pseudogap phenomena exhibited by the cuprates. Although the antiferromagnetic response in the pseudogap state has been reported for a number of co
mpounds, there exists no information for structurally simple HgBa$_2$CuO$_{4+delta}$. Here we report neutron scattering results for HgBa$_2$CuO$_{4+delta}$ (superconducting transition temperature T$_c$ $sim$ 71 K, pseudogap temperature T* $sim$ 305 K) that demonstrate the absence of the two most prominent features of the magnetic excitation spectrum of the cuprates: the X-shaped hourglass response and the resonance mode in the superconducting state. Instead, the response is Y-shaped, gapped, and significantly enhanced below T*, and hence a prominent signature of the pseudogap state.
