Pairing and Phase Coherence in High Temperature Superconductors

Abstract

Mobile holes in an antiferromagnetic insulator form a slowly fluctuating array of quasi one-dimensional metallic stripes, which induce a spin gap or pseudogap in the intervening Mott-insulating regions. The mobile holes on an individual stripe acquire a spin gap via pair hopping between the stripe and its environment; i.e. via a magnetic analog of the usual superconducting proximity effect. This process is the analog of pairing in conventional superconductors. At non-vanishing stripe densities, Josephson coupling between stripes produces a dimensional crossover to a state with long-range superconducting phase coherence. In contrast to conventional superconductors, the superconducting state is characterised by a high density of (spin) pairs, but the phase stiffness, which is determined by the density and mobility of holes on the stripes, is very low.

4 pages. Proceedings of MMS-High Temperature Superconductivity, V (1997) To be published in Physica C

References in corpus (1)

• Superconductivity-Induced Anomalies in the Spin Excitation Spectra of Underdoped YBa_2 Cu_3 O_{6+x}

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Scanning tunneling spectroscopy of high-temperature superconductors
• Evolution of Magnetic and Superconducting Fluctuations with Doping of High-Tc Superconductors
• Anomalies of the infrared-active phonons in underdoped YBCO as an evidence for the intra-bilayer Josephson effect
• Stripes and holes in a two-dimensional model of spinless fermions and hardcore bosons
• 1D Quantum transport in the even-chain spin-ladder compound Sr2.5Ca11.5Cu24O41 and YBa2Cu4O8
• Separating pairing from quantum phase coherence dynamics above the superconducting transition by femtosecond spectroscopy
• Sum rule analysis of Umklapp processes and Coulomb energy: application to cuprate superconductivity
• Crossover from the 2D Heisenberg to the 1D Quantum Spin Ladder Regime in Underdoped High Tc Cuprates