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# Decrease of upper critical field with underdoping in cuprate superconductors

## Abstract

It is still unclear why the transition temperature Tc of cuprate superconductors falls with underdoping. The doping dependence of the critical magnetic field Hc2 is directly relevant to this question, but different estimates of Hc2 are in sharp contradiction. We resolve this contradiction by tracking the characteristic field scale of superconducting fluctuations as a function of doping, via measurements of the Nernst effect in La1.8−xEu0.2SrxCuO4. Hc2 is found to fall with underdoping, with a minimum where stripe order is strong. The same non-monotonic behaviour is observed in the archetypal cuprate superconductor YBa2Cu3Oy. We conclude that competing states such as stripe order weaken superconductivity and cause both Hc2 and Tc to fall as cuprates become underdoped.

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## Change history

• ### 28 August 2012

In the version of this Article originally published online, the unit on the y axis of Figure 4c was incorrect. This has been corrected in all versions of the Article

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## Acknowledgements

We thank H. Aubin, K. Behnia, A.M. Finkel’stein, V. Galitski, S. A. Kivelson, K. Michaeli, A. J. Millis, M. R. Norman, M. Serbyn, M. A. Skvortsov, A-M. Tremblay, D. van der Marel, A. Varlamov, and S. Weyerneth for fruitful discussions. We thank S. Y. Li for the resistivity data on Nd–LSCO (Supplementary Fig. S6) and J. Corbin for his assistance with the experiments. We thank K. Michaeli for her unpublished calculations in Fig. 6 and Supplementary Fig. S7. We thank the LNCMI for access to a high-field magnet allowing us to get data up to 28 T (Fig. 2) and 34 T (Fig. 6). J.C. was supported by Fellowships from the Fonds de recherche du Québec—Nature et technologies (FQRNT) and the Swiss National Foundation. E.H. was supported by a Fellowship from the FQRNT and a Junior Fellowship from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). L.T. acknowledges support from CIFAR and funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, FQRNT, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and a Canada Research Chair.

## Author information

Authors

### Contributions

J.C. initiated the project; J.C., N.D-L., O.C-C., F.L., E.H., J-Ph.R. and R.D. performed the Nernst measurements in Sherbrooke; J.C., N.D-L., F.L., O.C-C. and G.G. performed the Nernst measurements at the LNCMI in Grenoble; S.P., T.T. and H.T. prepared the Eu–LSCO samples and measured their resistivity; J.C., N.D-L. and L.T. analysed the data; J.C., N.D-L. and L.T. wrote the manuscript; L.T. supervised the project.

### Corresponding author

Correspondence to Louis Taillefer.

## Ethics declarations

### Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

## Supplementary information

### Supplementary Information

Supplementary Information (PDF 1627 kb)

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Chang, J., Doiron-Leyraud, N., Cyr-Choinière, O. et al. Decrease of upper critical field with underdoping in cuprate superconductors. Nature Phys 8, 751–756 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2380

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• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2380

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