2010/11/30 by Colin V. Parker, Colin Parker, Pegor Aynajian +7 · 1 citation
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Condensed matter physics #Cuprate #High-temperature superconductivity #Iron-based superconductors research #Magnetic and transport properties of perovskites and related materials #Materials science #Physics #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Pseudogap #Superconductivity #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/nature09597
published as Nature 468, 677-680 (02 December 2010) · preprint version, 25 pages including supplementary information
openalex publication_date 2010/11/30 · arxiv created 2010/12/01 · arxiv updated 2010/12/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Doped Mott insulators have been shown to have a strong propensity to form patterns of holes and spins often referred to as stripes. In copper-oxides, doping also gives rise to the pseudogap state, which transforms into a high temperature superconductor with sufficient doping or by reducing the temperature. A long standing question has been the interplay between pseudogap, which is generic to all hole-doped cuprates, and stripes, whose static form occurs in only one family of cuprates over a narrow range of the phase diagram. Here we examine the spatial reorganization of electronic states with the onset of the pseudogap state at T* in the high-temperature superconductor Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+x using spectroscopic mapping with the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). We find that the onset of the pseudogap phase coincides with the appearance of electronic patterns that have the predicted characteristics of fluctuating stripes. As expected, the stripe patterns are strongest when the hole concentration in the CuO2 planes is close to 1/8 (per Cu). While demonstrating that the fluctuating stripes emerge with the onset of the pseudogap state and occur over a large part of the cuprate phase diagram, our experiments indicate that they are a consequence of pseudogap behavior rather than its cause.