Unified electronic phase diagram for hole-doped high-Tc cuprates

TL;DR

This paper constructs a unified electronic phase diagram for hole-doped high-Tc cuprates, revealing how characteristic temperatures and energies evolve with doping and their relation to superconductivity and pseudogap phases.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive phase diagram based solely on experimental data, highlighting the asymmetric dome shape and the doping limits of high-Tc physics across different cuprates.

Findings

Characteristic temperatures and energies converge at specific doping levels.

Pseudogap phase precedes and coexists with superconductivity.

High-Tc physics ends at a doping level 1.3 times the optimal doping.

Abstract

We have analyzed various characteristic temperatures and energies of hole-doped high-Tc cuprates as a function of a dimensionless hole-doping concentration (pu). Entirely based on the experimental grounds we construct a unified electronic phase diagram (UEPD), where three characteristic temperatures (T*'s) and their corresponding energies (E*'s) converge as pu increases in the underdoped regime. T*'s and E*'s merge together with the Tc curve and 3.5kBTc curve at pu - 1.1 in the overdoped regime, respectively. They finally go to zero at pu - 1.3. The UEPD follows an asymmetric half-dome-shaped Tc curve in which Tc appears at pu - 0.4, reaches a maximum at pu - 1, and rapidly goes to zero at pu - 1.3. The asymmetric half-dome-shaped Tc curve is at odds with the well-known symmetric superconducting dome for La2-xSrxCuO4 (SrD-La214), in which two characteristic temperatures and energies converge as pu increases and merge together at pu - 1.6, where Tc goes to zero. The UEPD clearly shows that pseudogap phase precedes and coexists with high temperature superconductivity in the underdoped and overdoped regimes, respectively. It is also clearly seen that the upper limit of high-Tc cuprate physics ends at a hole concentration that equals to 1.3 times the optimal doping concentration for almost all high-Tc cuprate materials, and 1.6 times the optimal doping concentration for the SrD-La214. Our analysis strongly suggests that pseudogap is a precursor of high-Tc superconductivity, the observed quantum critical point inside the superconducting dome may be related to the end point of UEPD, and the normal state of the underdoped and overdoped high temperature superconductors cannot be regarded as a conventional Fermi liquid phase.