Observation of a subharmonic gap singularity in interlayer tunneling characteristics of Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+d

TL;DR

This study reports the experimental detection of a subharmonic gap singularity in the interlayer tunneling of Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+d, revealing insights into the electronic states and transport mechanisms in high-temperature superconductors.

Contribution

It provides the first observation of a subharmonic gap singularity in layered cuprates and links it to interlayer coherence and doping-dependent electronic properties.

Findings

Singularity is most prominent in optimally doped crystals.

The singularity diminishes with decreasing doping.

It enables accurate superconducting gap measurement.

Abstract

A subharmonic structure in Josephson junctions appears due to Andreev reflections within the junction. Here we report on experimental observation of a subharmonic half-gap singularity in interlayer tunneling characteristics of a layered high temperature superconductor Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+d. The singularity is most pronounced in optimally doped crystals and vanishes with decreasing doping. It indicates existence of non-vanishing electronic density of states and certain metallic properties in the intermediate BiO layers, which grows stronger with increasing doping. This provides an additional coherent interlayer transport channel and can explain a gradual transition from an incoherent quasi-two-dimensional $c$-axis transport in underdoped to a coherent metallic transport in overdoped cuprates. Furthermore, due to a very small sub-gap current, the singularity allows unambiguous extraction of the superconducting gap, without distortion by self-heating.