Thermal conductivity of lightly Sr- and Zn-doped La$_2$CuO$_4$ single crystals

TL;DR

This study measures the thermal conductivities of lightly doped La$_2$CuO$_4$ crystals, revealing how Sr and Zn doping differently suppress phonon peaks and highlighting the role of stripe order and spin excitations in heat transport.

Contribution

It provides detailed experimental data on anisotropic thermal conductivity in lightly doped La$_2$CuO$_4$, emphasizing the effects of Sr and Zn doping and the influence of stripe correlations.

Findings

Phonon peaks are suppressed differently by Sr and Zn doping.

Stripe correlations significantly affect phonon heat transport.

Magnon peaks are robust against Zn but vanish with Sr doping.

Abstract

Both ab-plane and c-axis thermal conductivities ($\kappa_{ab}$ and $\kappa_c$) of lightly doped La$_{2-x}$Sr$_x$CuO$_4$ and La$_2$Cu$_{1-y}$Zn$_y$O$_4$ single crystals ($x$ or $y$ = 0 -- 0.04) are measured from 2 to 300 K. It is found that the low-temperature phonon peak (at 20 -- 25 K) is significantly suppressed upon Sr or Zn doping even at very low doping, though its precise doping dependences show interesting differences between the Sr and Zn dopants, or between the $ab$ plane and the c axis. Most notably, the phonon peak in $\kappa_c$ decreases much more quickly with Sr doping than with Zn doping, while the phonon-peak suppression in $\kappa_{ab}$ shows an opposite trend. It is discussed that the scattering of phonons by stripes is playing an important role in the damping of the phonon heat transport in lightly doped LSCO, in which static spin stripes has been observed by neutron scattering. We also show $\kappa_{ab}$ and $\kappa_c$ data of La$_{1.28}$Nd$_{0.6}$Sr$_{0.12}$CuO$_4$ and La$_{1.68}$Eu$_{0.2}$Sr$_{0.12}$CuO$_4$ single crystals to compare with the data of the lightly doped crystals for the discussion of the role of stripes. At high temperature, the magnon peak (i.e., the peak caused by the spin heat transport near the N\'{e}el temperature) in $\kappa_{ab}(T)$ is found to be rather robust against Zn doping, while it completely disappears with only 1% of Sr doping.