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Relationship between the parent charge transfer gap and maximum transition temperature in cuprates

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  • Physics & Astronomy
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Science Bulletin

Abstract

One of the biggest puzzles concerning the cuprate high temperature superconductors is what determines the maximum transition temperature (T c,max), which varies from less than 30 to above 130 K in different compounds. Despite this dramatic variation, a robust trend is that within each family, the double-layer compound always has higher T c,max than the single-layer counterpart. Here we use scanning tunneling microscopy to investigate the electronic structure of four cuprate parent compounds belonging to two different families. We find that within each family, the double layer compound has a much smaller charge transfer gap size (Δ CT), indicating a clear anticorrelation between Δ CT and T c,max. These results suggest that the charge transfer gap plays a key role in the superconducting physics of cuprates, which shed important new light on the high T c mechanism from doped Mott insulator perspective.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China. X.Z. thanks financial support from the Strategic Priority Research Program (B) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB07020300).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Low Dimensional Quantum Physics, Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Wei Ruan, Peng Cai, Cun Ye, Xintong Li, Zhenqi Hao & Yayu Wang

  2. Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Cheng Hu, Jianfa Zhao, Yingying Peng, Runze Yu, Changqing Jin & Xingjiang Zhou

  3. Institute for Advanced Study, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Zheng-Yu Weng

  4. Collaborative Innovation Center of Quantum Matter, Beijing, 100084, China

    Changqing Jin, Xingjiang Zhou, Zheng-Yu Weng & Yayu Wang

Authors
  1. Wei Ruan
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  2. Cheng Hu
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  3. Jianfa Zhao
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  4. Peng Cai
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  9. Zhenqi Hao
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Correspondence to Yayu Wang.

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Ruan, W., Hu, C., Zhao, J. et al. Relationship between the parent charge transfer gap and maximum transition temperature in cuprates. Sci. Bull. 61, 1826–1832 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11434-016-1204-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11434-016-1204-x

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