Melting of Charge Stripes in Vibrationally Driven La1.875Ba0.125CuO4: Assessing the Respective Roles of Electronic and Lattice Order in Frustrated Superconductors

Abstract

We report femtosecond resonant soft X-ray diffraction measurements of the dynamics of the charge order and of the crystal lattice in non-superconducting, stripe-ordered La1.875Ba0.125CuO4. Excitation of the in-plane Cu-O stretching phonon with a mid-infrared pulse has been previously shown to induce a transient superconducting state in the closely related compound La1.675Eu0.2Sr0.125CuO4. In La1.875Ba0.125CuO4, we find that the charge stripe order melts promptly on a sub-picosecond time scale. Surprisingly, the low temperature tetragonal distortion is only weakly reduced, reacting on significantly longer time scales that do not correlate with light-induced superconductivity. This experiment suggests that charge modulations alone, and not the LTT distortion, prevent superconductivity in equilibrium.

16 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Evidence for a Structurally-driven Insulator-to-metal Transition in VO2: a View from the Ultrafast Timescale
• Two-Dimensional Superconducting Fluctuations in Stripe-Ordered La(1.875)Ba(0.125)CuO(4)
• Dynamical layer decoupling in a stripe-ordered, high T_c superconductor
• Phase Fluctuations and the Absence of Topological Defects in Photo-excited Charge Ordered Nickelate

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