High-energy kink in high-temperature superconductors

Abstract

In conventional metals, electron-phonon coupling, or the phonon-mediated interaction between electrons, has long been known to be the pairing interaction responsible for the superconductivity. The strength of this interaction essentially determines the superconducting transition temperature TC. One manifestation of electron-phonon coupling is a mass renormalization of the electronic dispersion at the energy scale associated with the phonons. This renormalization is directly observable in photoemission experiments. In contrast, there remains little consensus on the pairing mechanism in cuprate high temperature superconductors. The recent observation of similar renormalization effects in cuprates has raised the hope that the mechanism of high temperature superconductivity may finally be resolved. The focus has been on the low energy renormalization and associated "kink" in the dispersion at around 50 meV. However at that energy scale, there are multiple candidates including phonon branches, structure in the spin-fluctuation spectrum, and the superconducting gap itself, making the unique identification of the excitation responsible for the kink difficult. Here we show that the low-energy renormalization at ~50 meV is only a small component of the total renormalization, the majority of which occurs at an order of magnitude higher energy (~350 meV). This high energy kink poses a new challenge for the physics of the cuprates. Its role in superconductivity and relation to the low-energy kink remains to be determined.

13 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• The Ground State of the Pseudogap in Cuprate Superconductors
• Self-consistent self-energy analysis of photoemission data
• Bare electron dispersion from photoemission experiments

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• Universality of the single-particle spectra of cuprate superconductors
• Doping dependent optical properties of Bi2201
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• Characteristics of oxygen isotope substitutions in the quasiparticle spectrum of Bi${}_2$Sr${}_2$CaCu${}_2$O${}_{8+\delta }$
• Finite temperature spectral function of a hole in a quantum antiferromagnet and role of phonons
• Renormalization group approach to anisotropic superconductivity
• Energy-dependent scaling of incoherent spectral weight and the origin of the waterfalls in high-Tc cuprates