One of the most intensely studied scenarios of high-temperature superconductivity (HTS) postulates pairing by exchange of magnetic excitations. Indeed, such excitations have been observed up to optimal doping in the cuprates. In the heavily overdoped regime, neutron scattering measurements indicate that magnetic excitations have effectively disappeared, and this has been argued to cause the demise of HTS with overdoping. Here we use resonant inelastic X-ray scattering, which is sensitive to complementary parts of reciprocal space, to measure the evolution of the magnetic excitations in La(2-x)Sr(x)CuO4 across the entire phase diagram, from a strongly correlated insulator (x = 0) to a non-superconducting metal (x = 0.40). For x = 0, well-defined magnon excitations are observed. These magnons broaden with doping, but they persist with a similar dispersion and comparable intensity all the way to the non-superconducting, heavily overdoped metallic phase. The destruction of HTS with overdoping is therefore caused neither by the general disappearance nor by the overall softening of magnetic excitations. Other factors, such as the redistribution of spectral weight, must be considered.

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The spin state of organic-based magnets at interfaces is to a great extent determined by the organic environment and the nature of the spin-carrying metal center, which is further subject to modifications by the adsorbate-substrate coupling. Direct chemical doping offers an additional route for tailoring the electronic and magnetic characteristics of molecular magnets. Here we present a systematic investigation of the effects of alkali metal doping on the charge state and crystal field of 3d metal ions in Cu, Ni, Fe, and Mn phthalocyanine (Pc) monolayers adsorbed on Ag. Combined X-ray absorption spectroscopy and ligand field multiplet calculations show that Cu(II), Ni(II), and Fe(II) ions reduce to Cu(I), Ni(I), and Fe(I) upon alkali metal adsorption, whereas Mn maintains its formal oxidation state. The strength of the crystal field at the Ni, Fe, and Mn sites is strongly reduced upon doping. The combined effect of these changes is that the magnetic moment of high- and low-spin ions such as Cu and Ni can be entirely turned off or on, respectively, whereas the magnetic configuration of MnPc can be changed from intermediate (3/2) to high (5/2) spin. In the case of FePc a 10-fold increase of the orbital magnetic moment accompanies charge transfer and a transition to a high-spin state.

Although all superconducting cuprates display charge-ordering tendencies, their low-temperature properties are distinct, impeding efforts to understand the phenomena within a single conceptual framework. While some systems exhibit stripes of charge and spin, with a locked periodicity, others host charge density waves (CDWs) without any obviously related spin order. Here we use resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) to follow the evolution of charge correlations in the canonical stripe ordered cuprate La 1.875 Ba 0.125 CuO 4 (LBCO 1/8) across its ordering transition. We find that hightemperature charge correlations are unlocked from the wavevector of the spin correlations, signaling analogies to CDW phases in various other cuprates. This indicates that stripe order at low temperatures is stabilized by the coupling of otherwise independent charge and spin density waves, with important implications for the relation between charge and spin correlations in the cuprates.Charge density waves | Stripes | Superconductivity | Cuprates W hen holes are doped into the Mott insulating parent compounds of the cuprates, multiple competing interactions conspire to form a rich phase diagram. In the underdoped regime, holes can save energy by clustering together on neighboring sites in order to minimize the number of broken magnetic bonds, but by doing so they pay an extra energy cost of the increased inter-site Coulomb repulsion and reduced kinetic energy. Several early theoretical works suggested that frustration between these different ordering tendencies generates an instability towards spin density wave (SDW) order (1-5) and low-energy incommensurate SDW correlations were indeed observed around the same time (6-8). Such considerations were key to the discovery of "stripes" in the La2−x−y(Nd/Eu)y(Sr/Ba)xCuO4 or 214 family of cuprates. These correlations were found to be strongest at a doping level of 1/8 for which static spin and charge order forms at wavevectors related by a factor of two (9, 10). This phase was often conceptualized in terms of a dominant spin degree of freedom, as the underdoped cuprates have a large magnetic energy scale and a relatively small electronic density of states at the Fermi level (1-5). Furthermore, although high-temperature spin correlations were easily seen (7,8,10), directly detecting high-temperature charge correlations proved beyond the sensitivity of standard x-ray and neutron scattering measurements. Most compellingly, charge and spin ordering appeared, until recently, to be absent in cuprates in which there was a low-energy spin gap such as YBa2Cu3O6+x (YBCO), Bi1.5Pb0.5Sr1.54CaCu2O 8+δ (BSCCO2212), and HgBa2CuO 4+δ (HBCO1201), so the discovery of CDW correlations in these systems generated great interest (11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19). While the similarity of CDW phase diagrams in these materials may indicate a unified CDW mechanism (20, 21), many of the CDW properties reported in these materials were, however, notably different than that in LBCO 1/8. The CDW incommensurability...

Although charge density waves (CDWs) are omnipresent in cuprate high-temperature superconductors, they occur at significantly different wavevectors, confounding efforts to understand their formation mechanism. Here, we use resonant inelastic x-ray scattering to investigate the dopingand temperature-dependent CDW evolution in La2−xBaxCuO4 (x = 0.115 − 0.155). We discovered that the CDW develops in two stages with decreasing temperature. A precursor CDW with quasi-commensurate wavevector emerges first at high-temperature. This doping-independent precursor CDW correlation originates from the CDW phase mode coupled with a phonon and "seeds" the low-temperature CDW with strongly doping dependent wavevector. Our observation reveals the precursor CDW and its phase mode as the building blocks of the highly intertwined electronic ground state in the cuprates. arXiv:1906.07149v3 [cond-mat.supr-con]