2019/04/30 by Yong Zhong, Jia-Qi Fan, Rui-Feng Wang +15 · 30 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #Ambipolar diffusion #Condensed matter physics #Cuprate #Doping #Electron #Hubbard model #Magnetic and transport properties of perovskites and related materials #Materials science #Mott insulator #Mott transition #Physics #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Quantum mechanics #Superconductivity #cond-mat.mtrl-sci #cond-mat.str-el #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.125.077002
published in Physical Review Letters 125(7), 077002 (American Physical Society) · 5 pages, 4 figures, See Supplemental Material at https://journals.aps.org/prl/supplemental/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.077002
openalex created_date 2019/05/03 · openalex publication_date 2020/08/12 · arxiv created 2020/08/13 · arxiv updated 2020/08/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Identifying the essence of doped Mott insulators is one of the major outstanding problems in condensed matter physics and the key to understanding the high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates. We report real space visualization of Mott insulator-metal transition in Sr1-xLaxCuO2+y cuprate films that cover both the electron- and hole-doped regimes. Tunneling conductance measurements directly on the copper-oxide (CuO2) planes reveal a systematic shift in the Fermi level, while the fundamental Mott-Hubbard band structure remains unchanged. This is further demonstrated by exploring the atomic-scale electronic response of CuO2 to substitutional dopants and intrinsic defects in a sister compound Sr0.92Nd0.08CuO2. The results may be better explained in the framework of self-modulation doping, similar to that in semiconductor heterostructures, and form a basis for developing any microscopic theories for cuprate superconductivity.