Abstract
In copper oxide superconductors, the lightly doped (small dopant concentration, x) region is of major interest1,2 because superconductivity, antiferromagnetism and the pseudogap state come together near a critical doping value, xc. But the way in which superconductivity is destroyed as x is decreased at very low temperatures, T, is not clear3,4,5,6,7. Does the pair condensate vanish abruptly at a critical value, xc? Or is phase coherence of the condensate destroyed by spontaneous vortices—as is the case at elevated T (refs 8, 9, 10)? So far, magnetization data at low T are very sparse in this region of the phase diagram. Here, we report torque magnetometry measurements on La2−xSrxCuO4, which show that, in zero magnetic field, quantum phase fluctuations destroy superconductivity at xc≈0.055. The phase-disordered condensate survives to x=0.03. In finite field H, the vortex solid-to-liquid transition occurs at H lower than the depairing field, Hc2. The resulting phase diagram reveals the large fraction of the x–H plane occupied by the quantum vortex liquid.
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Acknowledgements
Valuable discussions with Y. Wang, Z. Tešanović, S. Sachdev, S. A. Kivelson, P. W. Anderson and J. C. Davis are acknowledged. The research at Princeton was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through an MRSEC grant DMR 0213706. Research at CRIEPI was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Science from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The high-field measurements were carried out in the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Tallahassee, which is supported by NSF, the Department of Energy and the State of Florida.
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Li, L., Checkelsky, J., Komiya, S. et al. Low-temperature vortex liquid in La2−xSrxCuO4. Nature Phys 3, 311–314 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys563
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys563
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