Pseudogap Behavior Revealed in Interlayer Tunneling in Overdoped Bi$_2$Sr$_2$CaCu$_2$O$_{8+x}$

TL;DR

This study used heating-compensated interlayer tunneling spectroscopy on overdoped Bi$_2$Sr$_2$CaCu$_2$O$_{8+x}$ to reveal that the pseudogap persists up to nearly room temperature and coexists with superconductivity near $T_c$, indicating separate origins.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates the use of heating-compensated ITS to accurately identify the pseudogap onset temperature and its coexistence with superconductivity in overdoped cuprates.

Findings

Pseudogap onset temperature reaches near room temperature.

Superconducting gap and pseudogap coexist near $T_c$.

Hump voltage follows superconducting gap below $T_c$.

Abstract

We report heating-compensated interlayer tunneling spectroscopy (ITS) performed on stacks of overdoped Bi$_2$Sr$_2$CaCu$_2$O$_{8+x}$ intrinsic junctions, where most of bias-induced heating in the ITS was eliminated. The onset temperature of the pseudogap (PG), revealed in the hump structure of the electronic excitation spectra, reached nearly room temperature for our overdoped intrinsic junctions, which represented the genuine PG onset. At a temperature below but close to $T_c$, both the superconducting coherence peak and the pseudogap hump coexisted, implying that the two gaps are of separate origins. The hump voltage increased below $T_c$, following the superconducting gap voltage, which led to a conclusion that the hump structure below $T_c$ in our ITS arose from the combined contribution of the quasiparticle spectral weights of two different characters; one of the superconducting state and another of the PG state near the antinodal region.