A central issue in the physics of high temperature superconductors is to understand superconductivity within a single copper-oxide layer or bilayer, the fundamental structural unit in the cuprates, and how it is lost with underdoping.As mobile holes are removed from the CuO 2 planes, the transition temperature T C and superfluid density n S decrease in a surprisingly correlated fashion in crystals and thick films 1-4 . We seek to elucidate the intrinsic physics of bilayers in the strongly underdoped regime, near the critical doping level where superconductivity disappears. We report measurements of n S (T) in films of Y 1-x Ca x Ba 2 Cu 3 O 7-δ as thin as two copper-oxide bilayers with T C 's as low as 3 K. In addition to seeing the two-dimensional (2D) Kosterlitz-Thouless-Berezinski transition 5,6 at T C , we observe a remarkable scaling of T C with n S (0) that demonstrates that the disappearance of superconductivity with underdoping is due to quantum fluctuations near a T = 0 2D quantum critical point.Early measurements 1 of the suppression of superfluid density n S and T C for moderately underdoped cuprates prompted the suggestion that thermal fluctuations 7 of the phase of the superconducting order parameter were the primary cause. This 1
We investigate T c and magnetic penetration depth λ(T) near the superconductor-metal quantum phase transition in overdoped La 2-x Sr x CuO 4 films. Both T c and superfluid density n s , λ -2 , decrease with overdoping. They obey the scaling relation T c [λ -2 (0)] α with α ½. We discuss this result in the frameworks of disordered d-wave superconductors and of scaling near quantum critical points. Our result, and the linear scaling (α 1) found for the more anisotropic T 2 Ba 2 CuO 6+δ , can both be understood in terms of quantum critical scaling, with different dimensionalities for fluctuations.
Using a low-frequency two-coil technique, we measure the magnetic penetration depth ͑T͒ of superconducting Nb films with thicknesses 20 Å ഛ d ഛ 228 Å sputtered onto oxidized Si substrates. We find a phenomenological dependence of T c on d, T c / 8.5 K Ϸ tanh͑d /70 Å͒ for films thinner than 250 Å.−2 ͑T͒ / −2 ͑0͒ is well fitted by weak-coupling dirty-limit theory with a weak-coupling gap, ⌬͑0͒ = 1.8k B T c .−2 ͑0͒ agrees with dirty-limit theory, given the experimental values of transition temperature T c and residual resistivity 0 . These results indicate that the suppression of T c is due to mechanisms that weaken the effective pairing interaction and not due to pair breaking interactions.
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