Scanning tunneling spectroscopy of high-temperature superconductors

By O. Fischer, M. Kugler, I. Maggio-Aprile, C. Berthod, C. Renner. 2006

759 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Tunneling spectroscopy has played a central role in the experimental verification of the microscopic theory of superconductivity in classical superconductors. Initial attempts to apply the same approach to high-temperature superconductors were hampered by various problems related to the complexity of these materials. The use of scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy (STM and STS) on these compounds allowed the main difficulties to be overcome. This success motivated a rapidly growing scientific community to apply this technique to high-temperature superconductors. This paper reviews the experimental highlights obtained over the last decade. The crucial efforts to gain control over the technique and to obtain reproducible results are first recalled. Then a discussion on how the STM and STS techniques have contributed to the study of some of the most unusual and remarkable properties of high-temperature superconductors is presented: the unusually large gap values and the absence of scaling with the critical temperature, the pseudogap and its relation to superconductivity, the unprecedented small size of the vortex cores and its influence on vortex matter, the unexpected electronic properties of the vortex cores, and the combination of atomic resolution and spectroscopy leading to the observation of periodic local density of states modulations in the superconducting and pseudogap states and in the vortex cores.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a1bd1fea0615c755e19bc887ababefffbfbbabb4

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In Condensed Matter Physics

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

Citations in the corpus

Two gaps make a high-temperature superconductor? (2007, methodology): “This is the same in some tunneling experiments such as STM, which however do not provide direct momentum resolution but measure on both sides of EF [ 18 ].”
Phase separation and magnetic order in K-doped iron selenide superconductor (2011, background): “Such a configuration for unconventional superconductors has been highly desirable, but very challenging to achieve owing to the difficulty in preparing a suitable surface for STM studie”
Odd-frequency superconductivity (2017, methodology): “This leads to an enhancement of the zero-energy density of states locally in the vortex core, an effect which has been observed via scanning tunneling microscope (STM) measurements (Fischer et al., 2007; Gygi and Schlüter, 1991; Hess et al., 1989).”
Andreev bound states in supercurrent-carrying carbon nanotubes revealed (2010, neutral): “In effect, the ABS concept quantitatively explains the Josephson effect in atomic contacts [10]; it also explains tunneling spectroscopy of vortex cores and surface states in some superconductors [11].”
Progress and perspectives on electron-doped cuprates (2009, background): “Similar to the hole-doped compounds (Fischer et al., 2007), the claim is that features in the tunneling spectra can be related to an electron-bosonic mode coupling at energies of 10.5 ± 2.5 meV.”
Localization of preformed Cooper pairs in disordered superconductors (2010, neutral): “(DOS) using scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) spectroscop”
Imaging the two gaps of the high-temperature superconductor Bi 2 Sr 2 CuO 6+ x (2007, background): “In addition, the gap above Tc observed in these systems seem to scale with the gap below T, across doping levels [23].”