Doping effect of Cu and Ni impurities on the Fe-based superconductor Ba0.6K0.4Fe2As2

TL;DR

This study investigates how Cu and Ni impurities affect the superconducting properties of Ba0.6K0.4Fe2As2, revealing impurity-induced electron doping, suppression of T_c, and implications for pairing mechanisms.

Contribution

It provides detailed experimental analysis of impurity effects on superconductivity and electronic structure, supporting the sign-reversal pairing model in Fe-based superconductors.

Findings

Cu and Ni impurities suppress T_c at different rates

Impurities induce electron doping and change Hall coefficient sign

Superconductivity shows robustness against impurity doping

Abstract

Copper and Nickel impurities have been doped into the iron pnictide superconductor Ba0.6K0.4Fe2As2. Resistivity measurements reveal that Cu and Ni impurities suppress superconducting transition temperature T_c with rates of \Delta T_c/Cu-1% = -3.5 K and \Delta T_c/Ni-1% = -2.9 K respectively. Temperature dependence of Hall coefficient R_H of these two series of samples show that both Cu-doping and Ni-doping can introduce electrons into Ba0.6K0.4Fe2As2. With more doping, the sign of R_H gradually changes from positive to negative, while the changing rate of Cu-doped samples is much faster than that of Ni-doped ones. Combining with the results of first-principles calculations published previously and the non-monotonic evolution of the Hall coefficient in the low temperature region, we argue that when more Cu impurities were introduced into Ba0.6K0.4Fe2As2, the removal of Fermi spectral weight in the hole-like Fermi surfaces is much stronger than that in the electron-like Fermi surfaces, which is equivalent to significant electron doping effect. DC magnetization and the lattice constants analysis reveal that static magnetic moments and notable lattice compression have been formed in Cu-doped samples. It seems that the superconductivity can be suppressed by the impurities disregard whether they are magnetic or nonmagnetic in nature. This gives strong support to a pairing gap with a sign reversal, like S^\pm. However, the relatively slow suppression rates of T_c show the robustness of superconductivity of Ba0.6K0.4Fe2As2 against impurities, implying that multi-pairing channels may exist in the system.