High-Tc Superconductivity and Antiferromagnetism in Multilayered Copper Oxides - A New Paradigm of Superconducting Mechanism -

TL;DR

This paper reviews multilayered copper oxides, highlighting the intrinsic phase diagram of antiferromagnetism and high-temperature superconductivity, emphasizing the role of Mott physics and superexchange interactions over phonon-mediated pairing.

Contribution

It introduces a new paradigm for high-Tc superconductivity based on Mott physics and superexchange interactions, challenging traditional phonon-mediated theories.

Findings

Existence of AFM metallic state in doped Mott insulators

Presence of a uniformly mixed AFM and HTSC phase

Maximum Tc near the disappearance of AFM moment

Abstract

High-temperature superconductivity (HTSC) in copper oxides emerges on a layered CuO2 plane when an antiferromagnetic Mott insulator is doped with mobile hole carriers. We review extensive studies of multilayered copper oxides by site-selective nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), which have uncovered the intrinsic phase diagram of antiferromagnetism (AFM) and HTSC for a disorder-free CuO2 plane with hole carriers. We present our experimental findings such as the existence of the AFM metallic state in doped Mott insulators, the uniformly mixed phase of AFM and HTSC, and the emergence of d-wave SC with a maximum Tc just outside a critical carrier density, at which the AFM moment on a CuO2 plane disappears. These results can be accounted for by the Mott physics based on the t-J model. The superexchange interaction J_in among spins plays a vital role as a glue for Cooper pairs or mobile spin-singlet pairs, in contrast to the phonon-mediated attractive interaction among electrons established in the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory. We remark that the attractive interaction for raising the $T_c$ of HTSC up to temperatures as high as 160 K is the large J_in (~0.12 eV), which binds electrons of opposite spins to be on neighboring sites, and that there are no bosonic glues. It is the Coulomb repulsive interaction U(> 6 eV) among Cu-3d electrons that plays a central role in the physics behind high-Tc phenomena. A new paradigm of the SC mechanism opens to strongly correlated electron matter.