Letter abstract
Nature Physics 4, 108 - 111 (2008)
Published online: 20 January 2008 | Corrected online: 15 January 2009 | doi:10.1038/nphys835
There is an Corrigendum (15 January 2009) associated with this Letter.
Subject Categories: Condensed-matter physics | Materials physics
Visualization of the interplay between high-temperature superconductivity, the pseudogap and impurity resonances
Kamalesh Chatterjee1, M. C. Boyer1, W. D. Wise1, Takeshi Kondo1,2,4, T. Takeuchi2,3, H. Ikuta2 & E. W. Hudson1
In conventional superconductors, the superconducting gap in the electronic excitation spectrum prevents scattering of low-energy electrons. In high-temperature superconductors (HTSs), an extra gap, the pseudogap1, develops well above the superconducting transition temperature TC. Here, we present a new avenue of investigating the pseudogap state, using scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) of resonances generated by single-atom scatterers. Previous studies on the superconducting state of HTSs2 have led to a fairly consistent picture in which potential scatterers, such as Zn, strongly suppress superconductivity in an atomic-scale region, while generating low-energy excitations with a spatial distribution—as imaged by STM3, 4—indicative of the d-wave nature of the superconducting gap. Surprisingly, we find that similar native impurity resonances coexist spatially with the superconducting gap at low temperatures and survive virtually unchanged on warming through TC. These findings demonstrate that properties of impurity resonances in HTSs are not determined by the nature of the superconducting state, as previously suggested, but instead provide new insights into the pseudogap state.
- Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
- Department of Crystalline Materials Science, Nagoya University, Nagoya 464-8603, Japan
- EcoTopia Science Institute, Nagoya University, Nagoya 464-8603, Japan
- Present address: Ames Laboratory and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011, USA
Correspondence to: E. W. Hudson1 e-mail: ehudson@mit.edu
In the version of this article originally published, Fig. 1c depicted a CuO plane, instead of the intended CuO2 plane. The lattice should have appeared as below. The text of the article and conclusions reached are unaffected. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.
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