Reply to comment on "Essence of intrinsic tunnelling: Distinguishing intrinsic features from artefacts

TL;DR

This paper defends recent experimental findings showing heating effects dominate intrinsic tunneling features in HTSC IVC measurements, demonstrating that heating can obscure genuine intrinsic responses.

Contribution

It provides experimental evidence that heating effects are significant in HTSC IVC measurements and clarifies the interpretation of intrinsic tunneling spectroscopy data.

Findings

Heating effects dominate at high heat loads in IVC measurements.

Temperature dependence of R(T) explains various IVC behaviors.

Data supports extrinsic origin of observed IVC features.

Abstract

The recent PRB, henceforth referred as Ref.[1], experimentally resolves the intrinsic shape of the c-axis current-voltage characteristics (IVC) of HTSC and demonstrates that at sufficiently high heat loads the heating-induced IVC nonlinearities exceed the intrinsic ones so radically that the latter might be safely ignored. The author of the comment fails to take account of the experimental findings by Ref.[1] and seeks to cast doubt on all its conclusions through reference to a brush-like IVC, which is claimed to be free of heating. I will show that this claim lacks substantiation; indeed it can be stated with certainty that the IVC is not free from heating. I will further show that the data selected for this comment make it possible to explore for the first time the effect of temperature on a range of loads where the genuine response is not hidden by heating and to demonstrate for the first time that $R(T)$ of the same sample is responsible for a rich variety of IVC behaviours taken above and below $T_c$ at bath temperatures spanned over 180K. Thus these data in fact provide strong novel evidence in favour of the major conclusions by Ref.[1], in particular the extrinsic cause of the key findings by intrinsic tunnelling spectroscopy.