Article abstract
Nature Physics 3, 184 - 191 (2007)
doi:10.1038/nphys542
Subject Categories: Condensed-matter physics | Materials physics
Fluctuating Cu–O–Cu bond model of high-temperature superconductivity
D. M. Newns1,2 and C. C. Tsuei2
Abstract
Twenty years of research have yet to produce a consensus on the origin of high-temperature superconductivity (HTS). However, several generic characteristics of the copper oxide superconductors have emerged as the essential ingredients of and/or constraints on any viable microscopic model of HTS. Besides a critical temperature Tc of the order of 100 K, they include a d-wave superconducting gap with Fermi liquid nodal excitations, a pseudogap with d-symmetry and the characteristic temperature scale T*, an anomalous doping-dependent oxygen isotope shift, nanometre-scale gap inhomogeneity and so on. The isotope shift implies a key role for oxygen vibrations, but conventional Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer single-phonon coupling is essentially forbidden by symmetry and by the on-site Coulomb interaction U. Here we invoke the nonlinear modulation of the Cu–Cu bond by planar oxygen vibrations. The Fermi liquid nature of the d-wave superconducting ground state supports a weak-coupling treatment of this modulation. The dominant fluctuations are manifested in a pattern of oxygen vibrational square amplitudes with quadrupolar symmetry around a given Cu site. On the basis of such bond fluctuations, both dynamic and static, we can understand the salient features of HTS.
- IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598, USA
- These authors contributed equally to this work
Correspondence to: e-mail: dennisn@us.ibm.com
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