Abstract
In conventional superconductors, the superconducting gap in the electronic excitation spectrum prevents scattering of low-energy electrons. In high-temperature superconductors (HTSs), an extra gap, the pseudogap1, develops well above the superconducting transition temperature TC. Here, we present a new avenue of investigating the pseudogap state, using scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) of resonances generated by single-atom scatterers. Previous studies on the superconducting state of HTSs2 have led to a fairly consistent picture in which potential scatterers, such as Zn, strongly suppress superconductivity in an atomic-scale region, while generating low-energy excitations with a spatial distribution—as imaged by STM3,4—indicative of the d-wave nature of the superconducting gap. Surprisingly, we find that similar native impurity resonances coexist spatially with the superconducting gap at low temperatures and survive virtually unchanged on warming through TC. These findings demonstrate that properties of impurity resonances in HTSs are not determined by the nature of the superconducting state, as previously suggested, but instead provide new insights into the pseudogap state.
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Change history
15 January 2009
In the version of this article originally published, Fig. 1c depicted a CuO plane, instead of the intended CuO2 plane. The lattice should have appeared as below. The text of the article and conclusions reached are unaffected. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Y. Wang for his help in the preparation of this manuscript and A. V. Balatsky, J. E. Hoffman, K. M. Lang, P. A. Lee, T. Senthil and X.-G. Wen for their helpful comments. This research was supported in part by a Cottrell Scholarship awarded by the Research Corporation, by the MRSEC program of the NSF under award DMR 02-13282, and also by NSF CAREER award DMR-034891.
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K.C., M.C.B. and W.D.W. shared equal responsibility for all aspects of this project from instrument construction to data collection and analysis. T.K. grew the samples and helped refine the STM. T.T. and H.I. contributed to sample growth. E.W.H. advised.
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Chatterjee, K., Boyer, M., Wise, W. et al. Visualization of the interplay between high-temperature superconductivity, the pseudogap and impurity resonances. Nature Phys 4, 108–111 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys835
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys835
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