Electronic liquid crystal state in the high-temperature superconductor YBCO(6.45)

Abstract

Electronic phases with symmetry properties matching those of conventional liquid crystals have recently been discovered in transport experiments on semiconductor heterostructures and metal oxides at milli-Kelvin temperatures. We report the spontaneous onset of a onedimensional, incommensurate modulation of the spin system in the high-temperature superconductor YBa2Cu3O6.45 upon cooling below ~150 K, while static magnetic order is absent above 2 K. The evolution of this modulation with temperature and doping parallels that of the in-plane anisotropy of the resistivity, indicating an electronic nematic phase that is stable over a wide temperature range. The results suggest that soft spin fluctuations are a microscopic route towards electronic liquid crystals, and nematic order can coexist with high-temperature superconductivity in underdoped cuprates.

10 pages, 4+2 figures, includes a "materials and methods" as well as a "supporting text" section

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• An Intrinsic Bond-Centered Electronic Glass with Unidirectional Domains in Underdoped Cuprates
• Formation of a Nematic Fluid at High Fields in Sr3Ru2O7
• Spin dynamics in the pseudogap state of a high-temperature superconductor
• Anisotropic spin and charge excitations in superconductors: signature of electronic nematic order
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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Electronic phase separation in the slightly underdoped iron pnictide superconductor Ba(1-x)K(x)Fe(2)As(2)
• Renormalization group theory of nematic ordering in d-wave superconductors
• Magnetic-field-enhanced incommensurate magnetic order in the underdoped high-temperature superconductor YBa(2)Cu(3)O(6.45)
• Theory of the nodal nematic quantum phase transition in superconductors
• Time-Reversal Symmetry Breaking and Spontaneous Anomalous Hall Effect in Fermi Fluids
• Fluctuating Stripes in Strongly Correlated Electron Systems and the Nematic-Smectic Quantum Phase Transition
• Field-induced soft-mode quantum phase transition in La${}_{1.855}$Sr${}_{0.145}$CuO${}_4$
• First-Order Type Effects in YBa${}_2$Cu${}_3$O${}_{6+x}$ at the Onset of Superconductivity
• Signatures of the nematic ordering transitions in the thermal conductivity of d-wave superconductors
• Intimate relations between electronic nematic, d-density wave and d-wave superconducting states
• Inter-layer Josephson coupling in stripe-ordered superconducting cuprates