Abstract
Puzzling aspects of high-transition-temperature (high-Tc) superconductors include the prevalence of magnetism in the normal state and the persistence of superconductivity in high magnetic fields. Superconductivity and magnetism generally are thought to be incompatible, based on what is known about conventional superconductors. Recent results1, however, indicate that antiferromagnetism can appear in the superconducting state of a high-Tc superconductor in the presence of an applied magnetic field. Magnetic fields penetrate a superconductor in the form of quantized flux lines, each of which represents a vortex of supercurrents. Superconductivity is suppressed in the core of the vortex and it has been suggested that antiferromagnetism might develop there2. Here we report the results of a high-field nuclear-magnetic-resonance (NMR) imaging experiment3,4,5 in which we spatially resolve the electronic structure of near-optimally doped YBa2Cu3O7-δ inside and outside vortex cores. Outside the cores, we find strong antiferromagnetic fluctuations, whereas inside we detect electronic states that are rather different from those found in conventional superconductors.
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Acknowledgements
We thank J. A. Sauls, J. Moreno, R. Wortis and K. Machida for discussions. This work was supported by the Science and Technology Center for Superconductivity, the Materials Research Center at Northwestern Unviersity, and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory supported by the National Science Foundation and the State of Florida. M.E. acknowledges support from the US Department of Energy, Office of Science.
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Mitrović, V., Sigmund, E., Eschrig, M. et al. Spatially resolved electronic structure inside and outside the vortex cores of a high-temperature superconductor. Nature 413, 501–504 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35097039
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/35097039
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