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The electrical resistivity &rgr;c of the underdoped cuprate superconductor YBa2Cu3Oy was measured perpendicular to the CuO2 planes on ultrahigh quality single crystals in magnetic fields large enough to suppress superconductivity. The incoherent insulating-like behavior of &rgr;c at high temperature, characteristic of all underdoped cuprates, is found to cross over to a coherent regime of metallic behavior at low temperature. This crossover coincides with the emergence of the small electron pocket detected in the Fermi surface of YBa2Cu3Oy via quantum oscillations, the Hall and Seebeck coefficients, and with the detection of a unidirectional modulation of the charge density as seen by high-field nuclear magnetic resonance measurements. The low coherence temperature is quantitatively consistent with the small hopping integral t⊥_ inferred from the splitting of the quantum oscillation frequencies. We conclude that the Fermi-surface reconstruction in YBa2Cu3Oy at dopings from p = 0.08 to at least p = 0.15, attributed to stripe order, produces a metallic state with three-dimensional coherence deep in the underdoped regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of the metallic phase in the high-transition-temperature (high-Tc) copper oxide superconductors, and its evolution with carrier concentration, has been a long-standing mystery. A central question is how coherent electronic states, or quasiparticles, emerge from the antiferromagnetic insulator with doping. Recent quantum oscillation experiments on lightly doped copper oxides have shown evidence for small pockets of Fermi surface, the formation of which has been associated with the opening of the pseudogap—an anisotropic gap in the normal state excitation spectrum of unknown origin. As the doping is increased, experiments suggest that the full Fermi surface is restored, although the doping level at which the pseudogap closes and the nature of the electronic ground state beyond this point have yet to be determined. Here we report the observation of quantum oscillations in the overdoped superconductor Tl2Ba2CuO6+δ that show the existence of a large Fermi surface of well-defined quasiparticles covering two-thirds of the Brillouin zone. These measurements confirm that, in overdoped superconducting copper oxides, coherence is established at all Fermi wavevectors, even near the zone boundary where the pseudogap is maximal and electronic interactions are strongest; they also firmly establish the applicability of a generalized Fermi-liquid picture on the overdoped side of the superconducting phase diagram. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The excitations responsible for producing high-temperature superconductivity in the copper oxides have yet to be identified. Two promising candidates are collective spin excitations and phonons. A recent argument against spin excitations is based on their inability to explain structures observed in electronic spectroscopies such as photoemission and optical conductivity. Here, we use inelastic neutron scattering to demonstrate that collective spin excitations in optimally doped La2−xSrxCuO4 are more structured than previously thought. The excitations have a two-component structure with a low-frequency component strongest around 18 meV and a broader component peaking near 40–70 meV. The second component carries most of the spectral weight and its energy matches structures observed in photoemission in the range 50–90 meV. Our results demonstrate that collective spin excitations can explain features of electronic spectroscopies and are therefore likely to be strongly coupled to the electron quasiparticles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hall coefficient RH of the cuprate superconductor YBa2Cu3Oy was measured in magnetic fields up to 60 T for a hole concentration p from 0.078 to 0.152 in the underdoped regime. In fields large enough to suppress superconductivity, RH(T) is seen to go from positive at high temperature to negative at low temperature, for p>0.08. This change of sign is attributed to the emergence of an electron pocket in the Fermi surface at low temperature. At p<0.08, the normal-state RH(T) remains positive at all temperatures, increasing monotonically as T→0. We attribute the change of behavior across p=0.08 to a Lifshitz transition, namely a change in Fermi-surface topology occurring at a critical concentration pL=0.08, where the electron pocket vanishes. The loss of the high-mobility electron pocket across pL coincides with a tenfold drop in the conductivity at low temperature, revealed in measurements of the electrical resistivity ρ at high fields, showing that the so-called metal-insulator crossover of cuprates is in fact driven by a Lifshitz transition. It also coincides with a jump in the in-plane anisotropy of ρ, showing that without its electron pocket, the Fermi surface must have strong twofold in-plane anisotropy. These findings are consistent with a Fermi-surface reconstruction caused by a unidirectional spin-density wave or stripe order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence or absence of a quantum critical point and its location in the phase diagram of high temperature superconductors have been subjects of intense scrutiny. Clear evidence for quantum criticality, particularly in the transport properties, has proved elusive because the important low temperature region is masked by the onset of superconductivity. We present measurements of the low-temperature- in-plane resistivity of several highly doped La2-xSrxCuO4 single crystals in which the superconductivity had been stripped away by using high magnetic fields. In contrast to of the quantum critical systems, the resistivity varies linearity with temperature over a wide doping range with a gradient that scales monotonically with the superconducting transition temperature. It is maxima (at a critical doping level (Pc) ~ 0.19 at which superconductivity is most robust. Moreover, its value at Pc corresponds to the onset of quasi-particle incoherence along specific momentum directions, implying that the interaction that first promotes high-temperature superconductivity may ultimately destroy the very quasi-particle states involved in the superconducting pairing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a detailed synchrotron x-ray scattering study of the charge-density-wave (CDW) order in simple tetragonal HgBa2CuO4+δ (Hg1201). Resonant soft x-ray scattering measurements reveal that short-range order appears at a temperature that is distinctly lower than the pseudogap temperature and in excellent agreement with a prior transient reflectivity result. Despite considerable structural differences between Hg1201 and YBa2Cu3O6+δ, the CDW correlations exhibit similar doping dependencies, and we demonstrate a universal relationship between the CDW wave vector and the size of the reconstructed Fermi pocket observed in quantum oscillation experiments. The CDW correlations in Hg1201 vanish already below optimal doping, once the correlation length is comparable to the CDW modulation period, and they appear to be limited by the disorder potential from unit cells hosting two interstitial oxygen atoms. A complementary hard x-ray diffraction measurement, performed on an underdoped Hg1201 sample in magnetic fields along the crystallographic c axis of up to 16 T, provides information on the form factor of the CDW order. As expected from the single-CuO2-layer structure of Hg1201, the CDW correlations vanish at half-integer values of L and appear to be peaked at integer L. We conclude that the atomic displacements associated with the short-range CDW order are mainly planar, within the CuO2 layers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a direct NMR method to determine whether the interactions in a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL) state of a spin-1/2 Heisenberg antiferromagnetic ladder are attractive or repulsive. For the strong-leg spin ladder compound (C7H10N)2CuBr4 we find that the isothermal magnetic field dependence of the NMR relaxation rate T-11(H) displays a concave curve between the two critical fields bounding the TLL regime. This is in sharp contrast to the convex curve previously reported for a strong-rung ladder, (C5H12N)2CuBr4. We show that the concavity and the convexity of T-11(H), which is a fingerprint of spin fluctuations, directly reflect the attractive and repulsive fermionic interactions in the TLL, respectively. The interaction sign is alternatively determined from an indirect method combining bulk magnetization and specific heat data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exciton dynamics in monolayer black phosphorus is investigated over a very wide range of photoexcited exciton densities using time resolved photoluminescence. At low excitation densities, the exciton dynamics is successfully described in terms of a double exponential decay. With increasing exciton population, a fast, nonexponential component develops as exciton-exciton annihilation takes over as the dominant recombination mechanism under high excitation conditions. Our results identify an upper limit for the injection density, after which exciton-exciton annihilation reduces the quantum yield, which will significantly impact the performance of light emitting devices based on single-layer black phosphorus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The microscopic nature of an insulating state in the vicinity of a superconducting state in the presence of disorder is a hotly debated question. While the simplest scenario proposes that Coulomb interactions destroy the Cooper pairs at the transition, leading to localization of single electrons, an alternate possibility supported by experimental observations suggests that Cooper pairs instead directly localize. The question of the homogeneity, granularity, or possibly glassiness of the material on the verge of this transition is intimately related to this fundamental issue. Here, by combining macroscopic and nanoscale studies of superconducting ultrathin NbN films, we reveal nanoscopic inhomogeneities that emerge when the film thickness is reduced. For the thinnest films, scanning tunneling spectroscopy at low temperature unveils inhomogeneities in the superconducting properties, of typical size Li, that are not correlated to any structural inhomogeneity and that are found to persist above the critical temperature in the form of a pseudogap. Remarkably enough, while the thickest films display a purely two-dimensional behavior in the superconducting fluctuations above the critical temperature, paraconductivity in the pseudogap regime of the thinnest samples demonstrates fluctuations of the amplitude of the order parameter, corresponding to zero-dimensional fluctuating regions of size precisely Li. We propose that an anomalous diffusion slowing-down process is at play at long wave vectors, leading to some "confinement" of the superconducting fluctuations, which allows us to explain the simultaneous paradoxical presence of a pseudogap and zero-dimensional amplitude fluctuations of the order parameter. These findings call for further theoretical investigation to understand this intermediate state where Cooper pairs continuously evolve from a bound state of fermionic objects into localized bosonic entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two critical points have been revealed in the normal-state phase diagram of the electron-doped cuprate superconductor Nd2-xCexCuO4 by exploring the Fermi surface properties of high-quality single crystals by high-field magnetotransport. First, the quantitative analysis of the Shubnikov-de Haas effect shows that the weak superlattice potential responsible for the Fermi surface reconstruction in the overdoped regime extrapolates to zero at the doping level xc=0.175 corresponding to the onset of superconductivity. Second, the high-field Hall coefficient exhibits a sharp drop right below optimal doping xopt=0.145 where the superconducting transition temperature is maximum. This drop is most likely caused by the onset of long-range antiferromagnetic ordering. Thus the superconducting dome appears to be pinned by two critical points to the normal state phase diagram. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]