Superconductivity and Disorder in High-Tc Materials: Crystalline Copper Oxides and Liquid Metallic Hydrogen

TL;DR

This paper explores the role of disorder and phonons in high-temperature superconductivity in copper oxides and considers the potential for liquid metallic hydrogen to also exhibit high-Tc superconductivity, emphasizing disorder's impact on pairing mechanisms.

Contribution

It provides new insights into how atomic-scale disorder affects phonon coherence and superconductivity in cuprates and discusses the possibility of high-Tc superconductivity in liquid metallic hydrogen.

Findings

Disorder in copper oxides affects phonon coherence and Tc.

Experimental evidence links apical oxygen disorder to Tc variations.

Liquid metallic hydrogen may also exhibit high-temperature superconductivity.

Abstract

Our goals are to assist a non-practitioner understand likely resolution of the controversy about the boson that couples Cooper pairs in Cu oxides and to consider if high temperature superconductivity (HTS) in solid oxides might be related to predicted HTS in liquid metallic hydrogen (LMH) near 0 K. High temperatures (T~Tc~!D~100 K, where Tc is superconducting critical temperature and !D is the Debye temperature) induce phonon-phonon scattering in ordered materials, which is sensitive to impurities and disorder. Experimental results suggest the boson that couples Cooper pairs in Bi2SrCa2Cu2O8 is incoherent ion vibration caused by disorder, which is observed from ~100 K down to 4 K. Phonons are not well-defined in BSSCO and its coherence length is comparable to the dimension of its unit cell (~1 nm), as for other oxides. Sr2CuO3+d (Tc=95 K) has a crystal structure that enables experimental demonstration that disorder of apical oxygen atoms has a strong affect on Tc. Disorder in sold oxides on an atomic scale and the temperature dependence of phonons at high temperatures (T~!D) probably must be taken into account to understand HTS. There are several reasons to believe that LMH will be a high temperature superconductor and no known reason why LMH cannot be one.