Observation of a d-wave gap in electron-doped Sr2IrO4
By Yeongkwan Kim, N. Sung, J. Denlinger, B. J. Kim. Nature Physics, 2015
263 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Sr2IrO4 bears a striking electronic resemblance to the cuprate superconductors, except the iridate is an insulator. Introducing electrons into Sr2IrO4 leads to a d-wave gap, suggesting superconductivity or something equally exotic. High-temperature superconductivity in cuprates emerges out of a highly enigmatic ‘pseudogap’ metal phase. The mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity is probably encrypted in the elusive relationship between the two phases, which spectroscopically is manifested as Fermi arcs—disconnected segments of zero-energy states—collapsing into d-wave point nodes upon entering the superconducting phase. Here, we reproduce this distinct cuprate phenomenology in the 5d transition-metal oxide Sr2IrO4. Using angle-resolved photoemission, we show that the clean, low-temperature phase of 6–8% electron-doped Sr2IrO4 has gapless excitations only at four isolated points in the Brillouin zone, with a predominant d-wave symmetry of the gap. Our work thus establishes a connection between the low-temperature d-wave instability and the previously reported high-temperature Fermi arcs in electron-doped Sr2IrO4 (ref. 1). Although the physical origin of the d-wave gap remains to be understood, Sr2IrO4 is the first non-cuprate material to spectroscopically reproduce the complete phenomenology of the cuprates, thus offering a new material platform to investigate the relationship between the pseudogap and the d-wave gap.
Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dbb456faca3bff15d18e6f3fb38a1449fa9cbe9f
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In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
Citations in the corpus
- Kitaev materials (2017, background): “There is an intense ongoing search [15, 16] for superconductivity in Sr2IrO4 and other perovskite iridates.”
- Angle-resolved photoemission studies of quantum materials (2020, unknown): “…of nitrogen) single-element monolayer systems have been synthesized, covering an extremely diverse set of physical phenomena ranging from the theoretically predicted robust quantum spin Hall insulator (Liu et al., 2011b; Xu et al., 2013c) to tunable band gap semiconductor (Kim et al., 2015).”