Letter abstract
Nature Physics 1, 155 - 158 (2005)
doi:10.1038/nphys178
Subject Categories: Condensed-matter physics | Materials physics
Spatially modulated 'Mottness' in La2-xBaxCuO4
P. Abbamonte1,2, A. Rusydi1,3, S. Smadici1, G. D. Gu1, G. A. Sawatzky3,4 and D. L. Feng5
Competition between magnetism and the kinetic energy of mobile carriers (typically holes) in doped antiferromagnets may lead to 'stripe' phases1, 2, 3, 4, which are charged rivers separating regions of oppositely phased antiferromagnetism. In copper oxides the main experimental evidence for such coexisting static spin and charge order comes from neutron scattering in La1.48Nd0.4Sr0.12CuO4 (LNSCO; ref. 5) and La1.875Ba0.125CuO4 (LBCO; ref. 6). However, as a neutron is neutral, it does not detect charge but rather its associated lattice distortion7, so it is not known whether the stripes involve ordering of the doped holes. Here we present a study of the charge order in LBCO with resonant soft X-ray scattering (RSXS). We observe giant resonances near the Fermi level as well as near the correlated gap8, 9, demonstrating significant modulation in both the doped-hole density and the 'Mottness', or the degree to which the system resembles a Mott insulator10. The peak-to-trough amplitude of the valence modulation is estimated to be 0.063 holes, which suggests11 an integrated area of 0.59 holes under a single stripe, close to the expected 0.5 for half-filled stripes.
- National Synchrotron Light Source and Physics Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973, USA
- Department of Physics, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA
- Materials Science Centre, University of Groningen, 9747 AG Groningen, The Netherlands
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T-1Z1, Canada
- Department of Physics, Fudan University, Shangai 200433, China
Correspondence to: P. Abbamonte1,2 e-mail: abbamonte@mrl.uiuc.edu
Correspondence to: A. Rusydi1,3 Current address: Institute for Applied Physics, University of Hamburg, D-20355 Hamburg, Germany
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