2018/08/17 by Damjan Pelc, Zachary Anderson, Pelc, Damjan +7
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #Electronic and Structural Properties of Oxides #FOS: Physical sciences #Magnetic and transport properties of perovskites and related materials #Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1808.05763
openalex publication_date 2018/08/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A pivotal challenge posed by unconventional superconductors is to unravel how superconductivity emerges upon cooling from the generally complex normal state. Some of the most prominent unconventional superconductors are oxides: strontium titanate, strontium ruthenate, and the cuprates exhibit greatly different superconducting transition temperatures Tc, and although their respective superconducting pairing mechanisms remain unknown, they are thought to differ as well. Here we use nonlinear magnetic response, a probe that is uniquely sensitive to the superconducting precursor, to uncover remarkable universal behavior in these three distinct classes of superconductors. We find unusual exponential temperature dependence of the diamagnetic response above the transition temperature Tc, with a characteristic temperature scale that strongly varies with Tc. We correlate this scale with the sensitivity of Tc to local stress, and show that it is influenced by intentionally-induced structural disorder. The universal behavior is therefore caused by intrinsic, self-organized structural inhomogeneity, inherent to the oxides perovskite-based structure. The prevalence of such inhomogeneity has far-reaching implications for the interpretation of electronic properties of perovskite-related oxides in general.