Charge-4e superconductivity from pair-density-wave order in certain high-temperature superconductors
By Erez Berg, E. Fradkin, Steven A. Kivelson. 2009
214 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A number of spectacular experimental anomalies have been discovered recently in certain cuprates, notably La2−xBaxCuO4 and La1.6−xNd0.4SrxCuO4, which show unidirectional spin and charge order (known as stripe order). We have recently proposed to interpret these observations as evidence for a new ‘striped’ superconducting state, in which the superconducting order parameter is modulated in space, such that its average is precisely zero. Here, we show that thermal melting of the striped superconducting state can lead to a number of unusual phases, of which the most novel is a charge-4e superconducting state, with a corresponding fractional flux quantum h c=4e. These are never-before-observed states of matter, which, moreover, cannot arise from the conventional Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer mechanism. Thus, direct confirmation of their existence, even in a small subset of the cuprates, could have much broader implications for our understanding of high-temperature superconductivity. We propose experiments to observe fractional flux quantization, which could confirm the existence of these states. In a ‘striped’ superconductor, it may be possible to observe a superconducting state that, with increasing temperature, melts into a unique phase with charge-4e superconductivity, instead of the usual charge of 2e from paired electronic excitations.
Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3deffa7dfa39126cd03a36ab4ca41f807eb73833
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In Condensed Matter Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Ground-state phase diagram of the square lattice Hubbard model from density matrix embedding theory (2015, unknown): “is also a coexisting weak PDW (exhibiting a sign change across the cell), consistent with earlier stripe proposals [91]), (iii) inhomogeneities in the pairing order coexisting with the charge and spin orders in, e.”
- Amperean pairing and the pseudogap phase of cuprate superconductors (2014, background): “Thus, it is possible that the induced CDW order has long-range order while the pairing is short range [45].”
- Quantum states and intertwining phases in kagome materials (2023, background): “One study suggests an unusual charge pairing (that is, charge 4e or 6e) beyond the normal charge-2e pairing superconductivity 203–206 .”