One of the most intriguing features of some high-temperature cuprate superconductors is the interplay between one-dimensional “striped” spin order and charge order, and superconductivity. We used mid-infrared femtosecond pulses to transform one such stripe-ordered compound, nonsuperconducting La1.675Eu0.2Sr0.125CuO4, into a transient three-dimensional superconductor.
The emergence of coherent interlayer transport was evidenced by the prompt appearance of a Josephson plasma resonance in the c-axis optical properties. An upper limit for the time scale needed to form the superconducting phase is estimated to be 1 to 2 picoseconds, which is significantly faster than expected. This places stringent new constraints on our understanding of stripe order and its relation to superconductivity.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Light-Induced Superconductivity in a Stripe-Ordered Cuprate
This is a funny study, which shows how light mobilizes carriers in gapped states to become superconducting temporarily. [http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/189.full.pdf]. What does all these imply for the microscopic theory of cuprates, anyway?
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Another study on Sr2RuO4 appears also in this week's Science. This compound has unconventional superconductivity, with spin-triplet electron pairs. A fingerprint of this superfluid is observed. [http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/186.full.pdf]
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