Puddle formation, persistent gaps, and non-mean-field breakdown of superconductivity in overdoped (Pb,Bi)2Sr2CuO6+δ

Abstract

The cuprate high-temperature superconductors exhibit many unexplained electronic phases, but it was often thought that the superconductivity at sufficiently high doping is governed by conventional mean-field Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory[1]. However, recent measurements show that the number of paired electrons (the superfluid density) vanishes when the transition temperature Tc goes to zero[2], in contradiction to expectation from BCS theory. The origin of this anomalous vanishing is unknown. Our scanning tunneling spectroscopy measurements in the overdoped regime of the (Pb,Bi)2Sr2CuO6+δ high-temperature superconductor show that it is due to the emergence of puddled superconductivity, featuring nanoscale superconducting islands in a metallic matrix[3,4]. Our measurements further reveal that this puddling is driven by gap filling, while the gap itself persists beyond the breakdown of superconductivity. The important implication is that it is not a diminishing pairing interaction that causes the breakdown of superconductivity. Unexpectedly, the measured gap-to-filling correlation also reveals that pair-breaking by disorder does not play a dominant role and that the mechanism of superconductivity in overdoped cuprate superconductors is qualitatively different from conventional mean-field theory.

References in corpus (8)

• Electronic Origin of the Inhomogeneous Pairing Interaction in the High-Tc Superconductor Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+d
• Evolution of the electronic excitation spectrum with strongly diminishing hole-density in superconducting Bi_{2}Sr_{2}CaCu_{2}O_{8+δ}
• Theory of quantum metal to superconductor transitions in highly conducting systems
• Inhomogeneity Induces Resonance Coherence Peaks in Superconducting BSCCO
• First direct observation of the Van Hove singularity in the tunneling spectra of cuprates
• Nanoscale Proximity Effect in the High Temperature Superconductor Bi-2212
• Strongly-overdoped La${}_{2-x}$Sr${}_x$CuO${}_4$: Evidence for Josephson-coupled grains of strongly-correlated superconductor
• Quasiparticle interference and charge order in a heavily overdoped non-superconducting cuprate

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• Absence of a BCS-BEC crossover in the cuprate superconductors
• Evidence of a distinct collective mode in Kagome superconductors
• From non-metal to strange metal at the stripe-percolation transition in La${}_{2-x}$Sr${}_x$CuO${}_4$
• Ubiquitous Coexisting Electron-Mode Couplings in High Temperature Cuprate Superconductors
• Simulating Superconducting Properties of Overdoped Cuprates: the Role of Inhomogeneity
• Light-induced insulator-metal transition in Sr${}_2$IrO${}_4$ reveals the nature of the insulating ground state
• Emergent normal fluid in the superconducting ground state of overdoped cuprates
• The foot, the fan, and the cuprate phase diagram: Fermi-volume-changing quantum phase transitions
• Cuprate Twistronics for Quantum Hardware
• Strange metals and planckian transport in a gapless phase from spatially random interactions
• Extended strange metal regime from superconducting puddles
• Inhomogeneity, Fluctuations, and Gap Filling in Overdoped Cuprates
• Negligible Normal Fluid in Superconducting State of Heavily Overdoped Bi${}_2$Sr${}_2$CaCu${}_2$O${}_{8+\delta }$ Detected by Ultra-Low Temperature Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy
• Intrinsic phase fluctuation and superfluid density in doped Mott insulators
• Persistence of vortexlike phase fluctuations in underdoped to heavily overdoped Bi-2201 cuprates
• Unified model of the Hall effect from insulator to overdoped compounds in cuprate superconductors
• The Low-Temperature Phenomenology of Gap Inhomogeneity in the Cuprate Superconductors: High-Energy Granularity, Low-Energy Homogeneity, and Spectral Kinks
• The role of the pseudogap in cuprate superconductors revealed by the Hall effect
• Gap fluctuations, Cooper pairs with finite center-of-mass momentum, and suppression of superconductivity in inhomogeneous systems with dopant superpuddles agglomerates
• "Half-Bogoliubons" as the intermediate states for the phase coherence in underdoped cuprates
• Emergence of Fermi-liquid and BCS physics in overdoped cuprates