Non-destructive characterisation of dopant spatial distribution in cuprate superconductors

Abstract

Proper characterisation of investigated samples is vital when studying superconductivity as impurities and doping inhomogeneities can affect the physical properties of the measured system. We present a method where a polarised neutron imaging setup utilises the precession of spin-polarised neutrons in the presence of a trapped field in the superconducting sample to spatially map out the critical temperature for the phase transition between superconducting and non-superconducting states. We demonstrate this method on a superconducting crystal of the prototypical high-temperature superconductor (La,Sr)${}_2$CuO${}_4$. The results, which are backed up by complementary magnetic susceptibility measurements, show that the method is able to resolve minor variations in the transition temperature across the length of the LSCO crystal, caused by inhomogeneities in strontium doping.

arXiv comment11 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Electronic Phase Diagram of High-T_c Cuprate Superconductors from a Mapping of the In-Plane Resistivity Curvature
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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Nature of the magnetic stripes in fully oxygenated La${}_2$CuO${}_{4+y}$