Quantum oscillations and the Fermi surface in an underdoped high-Tc superconductor

By N. Doiron-Leyraud, C. Proust, D. Leboeuf, J. Levallois, J.-B. Bonnemaison, R. Liang, D. Bonn, W. Hardy, L. Taillefer. Nature, 2007

743 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite twenty years of research, the phase diagram of high-transition-temperature superconductors remains enigmatic. A central issue is the origin of the differences in the physical properties of these copper oxides doped to opposite sides of the superconducting region. In the overdoped regime, the material behaves as a reasonably conventional metal, with a large Fermi surface. The underdoped regime, however, is highly anomalous and appears to have no coherent Fermi surface, but only disconnected ‘Fermi arcs’. The fundamental question, then, is whether underdoped copper oxides have a Fermi surface, and if so, whether it is topologically different from that seen in the overdoped regime. Here we report the observation of quantum oscillations in the electrical resistance of the oxygen-ordered copper oxide YBa2Cu3O6.5, establishing the existence of a well-defined Fermi surface in the ground state of underdoped copper oxides, once superconductivity is suppressed by a magnetic field. The low oscillation frequency reveals a Fermi surface made of small pockets, in contrast to the large cylinder characteristic of the overdoped regime. Two possible interpretations are discussed: either a small pocket is part of the band structure specific to YBa2Cu3O6.5 or small pockets arise from a topological change at a critical point in the phase diagram. Our understanding of high-transition-temperature (high-Tc) superconductors will depend critically on which of these two interpretations proves to be correct.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a7ee5a9960fd19034ce82c2223926aa321b11ed8

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Citations in the corpus

In situ doping control of the surface of high-temperature superconductors (2008, neutral): “However, in high magnetic field, quantum oscillation”
Quantum oscillations and black hole ringing (2009, background): “In the hole-doped cuprates, the observation [19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25] of quantum oscillations with a period indicative of ‘small’ Fermi surfaces has shown that the ‘large’ Fermi surface Fermi liquid state at large doping must be strongly modified in the underdoped regime.”
Progress and perspectives on electron-doped cuprates (2009, background): “This manifests as a small hole-like Fermi arc (or perhaps pocket (Doiron-Leyraud et al., 2007; LeBoeuf et al., 2007)) for low hole dopings near the (π/2, π/2) point and a small electron-pocket near the (π, 0) point for low electron dopings (Armitage et al., 2002).”