2019/11/08 by Paul Malinowski, Qianni Jiang, Joshua Sanchez +7 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41567-020-0983-9
Main Text: 8 pages + 3 figures Supplementary: 8 pages +7 figures + 3 tables
arxiv created 2019/11/08 · arxiv updated 2020/08/12
High temperature superconductivity emerges in the vicinity of competing strongly correlated phases. In the iron-based superconductor Ba(Fe1-xCox)2As2, the superconducting state shares the composition-temperature phase diagram with an electronic nematic phase and an antiferromagnetic phase that break the crystalline rotational symmetry. Symmetry considerations suggest that anisotropic strain can enhance these competing phases and thus suppress the superconductivity. Here we study the effect of anisotropic strain on the superconducting transition in single crystals of Ba(Fe1-xCox)2As2 through electrical transport, magnetic susceptibility, and x-ray diffraction measurements. We find that in the underdoped and near-optimally doped regions of the phase diagram, the superconducting critical temperature is rapidly suppressed by both compressive and tensile stress, and in the underdoped case this suppression is enough to induce a strain-tuned superconductor to metal quantum phase transition.