2013/09/23 by N. Cotón, N. Coton, Coton, N. +5
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Magnetic and transport properties of perovskites and related materials #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con) #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1309.5910
main text (4pages, 4figs) + supplementary information (12pages, 8figs); pdfLaTeX; 1 TeX file + 12 PDF files for figures
openalex publication_date 2013/09/23 · arxiv created 2013/10/25 · arxiv updated 2013/10/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A pivotal ongoing debate about cuprate superconductors (HTS) is the location of the transition temperatures for the superconducting wave function phase coherence and condensation, Tphase and Tcond. This shall elucidate which of two very different interactions dictate the macroscopic superconducting phase diagram of HTS: either those between normal-state carriers or those between preformed vortices and antivortices. Here, we present unambiguous experimental determinations of Tphase and Tcond in the prototypical HTS La2-xSrxCuO4 as a function of the doping level x. Tphase is measured as a sharp change in the exponent alpha of the voltage-current characteristics (V proportional to Ialpha). Tcond is determined from the critical rounding of the ohmic resistivity above Tphase. Our measurements indicate that the transition to macroscopic superconductivity is accompanied by phase coherence due to vortex-antivortex binding and also that, for all x, Tcond lies only a few Kelvin above Tphase, limiting then the shift of the transition due to vortex-antivortex correlations.