High temperature superconductors

The two principle objectives are to develop materials that superconduct at higher temperatures and to better understand the mechanisms behind high temperature superconductivity. Experiments on the thermal reaction, structure, and physical properties of materials that exhibit superconductivity at high temperatures are discussed

Passivation of high temperature superconductors

The surface of high temperature superconductors such as YBa2Cu3O(7-x) are passivated by reacting the native Y, Ba and Cu metal ions with an anion such as sulfate or oxalate to form a surface film that is impervious to water and has a solubility in water of no more than 10(exp -3) M. The passivating treatment is preferably conducted by immersing the surface in dilute aqueous acid solution since more soluble species dissolve into the solution. The treatment does not degrade the superconducting properties of the bulk material

Scaling in high-temperature superconductors

A Hartree approximation is used to study the interplay of two kinds of scaling which arise in high-temperature superconductors, namely critical-point scaling and that due to the confinement of electron pairs to their lowest Landau level in the presence of an applied magnetic field. In the neighbourhood of the zero-field critical point, thermodynamic functions scale with the scaling variable $(T-T_{c2}(B))/B^{1/2\nu}$, which differs from the variable $(T - T_c(0))/B^{1/2\nu}$ suggested by the gaussian approximation. Lowest-Landau-level (LLL) scaling occurs in a region of high field surrounding the upper critical field line but not in the vicinity of the zero-field transition. For YBaCuO in particular, a field of at least 10 T is needed to observe LLL scaling. These results are consistent with a range of recent experimental measurements of the magnetization, transport properties and, especially, the specific heat of high-$T_c$ materials.Comment: 22 pages + 1 figure appended as postscript fil

Flux noise in high-temperature superconductors

Spontaneously created vortex-antivortex pairs are the predominant source of flux noise in high-temperature superconductors. In principle, flux noise measurements allow to check theoretical predictions for both the distribution of vortex-pair sizes and for the vortex diffusivity. In this paper the flux-noise power spectrum is calculated for the highly anisotropic high-temperature superconductor Bi-2212, both for bulk crystals and for ultra-thin films. The spectrum is basically given by the Fourier transform of the temporal magnetic-field correlation function. We start from a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless type theory and incorporate vortex diffusion, intra-pair vortex interaction, and annihilation of pairs by means of a Fokker-Planck equation to determine the noise spectrum below and above the superconducting transition temperature. We find white noise at low frequencies omega and a spectrum proportional to 1/omega^(3/2) at high frequencies. The cross-over frequency between these regimes strongly depends on temperature. The results are compared with earlier results of computer simulations.Comment: 9 pages, 4 PostScript figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Stripe phases in high-temperature superconductors

Stripe phases are predicted and observed to occur in a class of strongly-correlated materials describable as doped antiferromagnets, of which the copper-oxide superconductors are the most prominent representative. The existence of stripe correlations necessitates the development of new principles for describing charge transport, and especially superconductivity, in these materials.Comment: 5 pp, 1 color eps fig., to appear as a Perspective in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. US

Spectral Anomaly and High Temperature Superconductors

Spectral anomaly for interacting Fermions is characterized by the spectral function $A([k-k_F],\omega)$ satisfying the scaling relation $A(\Lambda^{y_1} [k-k_F],\Lambda^{y_2}\omega)= \Lambda^{y_A}A([k-k_F],\omega)$, where $y_1$, $y_2$, and $y_A$ are the exponents defining the universality class. For a Fermi liquid $y_1=1$, $y_2=1$, $y_A=-1$; all other values of the exponents are termed anomalous. In this paper, an example for which $y_1=1$, $y_2=1$, but $y_A=\alpha-1$ is considered in detail. Attractive interaction added to such a critical system leads to a novel superconducting state, which is explored and its relevance to high temperature cuprate superconductors is discussed.Comment: RevTex, 53 pages (including figures

Magnetic Vortices in High Temperature Superconductors

It is suggested that modes, observed in recent neutron scattering experiments by Lake {\it et al.}, on La$_{2-x}$Sr$_x$CuO$_4$ in strong magnetic fields ($\approx$ 7 T), are due to the existence of antiferromagnetic moments associated with the cores of vortices generated by the field. These moments form one-dimensional chains along the $c$-axis (the vortex axis), which at finite temperatures are disordered. At temperatures higher than 10 K the correlation length gets shorter than the lattice parameter, resulting in no scattering from coherent spin-waves above that temperature. The bandwidth of the spin-waves is estimated to be $\approx$ 4 meV in accordance with the observations.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figur