The superconductivity mechanism in Nd-1111 iron-based superconductor doped by calcium

TL;DR

This study investigates how calcium impurities affect superconductivity in Nd-1111 iron-based superconductors, revealing that calcium acts as a scattering center and supports the spin fluctuations mechanism as the pairing process.

Contribution

It provides experimental evidence linking calcium doping to suppression of superconductivity and confirms the role of spin fluctuations in the pairing mechanism.

Findings

Superconductivity decreases with calcium doping.

Calcium acts as a scattering center consistent with Abrikosov-Gorkov theory.

Spin fluctuations are confirmed as the dominant pairing mechanism.

Abstract

We described the effect of nonmagnetic impurity on the superconductivity behavior of the NdFeAsO0.8F0.2 iron-based superconductor. The resistivity measurement showed that the superconductivity suppressed upon increasing the low amounts of calcium impurity (x<0.05). Also, the Tc decreased with the increase in the residual resistivity. Such behavior was qualitatively described by the Abrikosov-Gorkov theory and confirmed that these impurities act as scattering centers. For our samples, the exchange constant between the calcium and the conduction electron spins was estimated Jexc=|8| meV. Moreover, we presented the phase diagram of our synthesized samples for the various calcium dopings and found that according to increase of the calcium impurities and temperature decreasing of the spin-density wave (TSDW), Fe ions arranged stripe antiferromagnetically at lower temperatures and also the superconducting transition temperature (TC) declined. Based on our results and in agreement with the available theories as explained in the text, since the S++ state has not an effect on the impurity doped samples, and the S+- state that is attributed to the spin fluctuations mechanism causes the superconducting suppression for low amounts of calcium. So, it confirms the role of the spinfluctuations as a dominant pairing mechanism in our synthesized samples.