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Antiferromagnetic order induced by an applied magnetic field in a high-temperature superconductor

Nature volume 415, pages 299–302 (2002)Cite this article

Abstract

One view of the high-transition-temperature (high-Tc) copper oxide superconductors is that they are conventional superconductors where the pairing occurs between weakly interacting quasiparticles (corresponding to the electrons in ordinary metals), although the theory has to be pushed to its limit1. An alternative view is that the electrons organize into collective textures (for example, charge and spin stripes) which cannot be ‘mapped’ onto the electrons in ordinary metals. Understanding the properties of the material would then need quantum field theories of objects such as textures and strings, rather than point-like electrons2,3,4,5,6. In an external magnetic field, magnetic flux penetrates type II superconductors via vortices, each carrying one flux quantum7. The vortices form lattices of resistive material embedded in the non-resistive superconductor, and can reveal the nature of the ground state—for example, a conventional metal or an ordered, striped phase—which would have appeared had superconductivity not intervened, and which provides the best starting point for a pairing theory. Here we report that for one high-Tc superconductor, the applied field that imposes the vortex lattice also induces ‘striped’ antiferromagnetic order. Ordinary quasiparticle models can account for neither the strength of the order nor the nearly field-independent antiferromagnetic transition temperature observed in our measurements.

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Figure 1: Magneto-transport and neutron diffraction data for La2-xSrxCuO4 as a function of temperature and magnetic field.
Figure 2: Magnetic neutron diffraction data for La2-xSrxCuO4 with x = 0.10.
Figure 3: The dependence on temperature and field of the ordered spin moment squared.

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Acknowledgements

We thank P. Dai, P. Hedegård, S. Kivelson, H. Mook, J. Zaanen, S. Sachdev and S.-C. Zhang for discussions. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the US Department of Energy. H.M.R. holds a Marie Curie fellowship funded by the European Community.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, PO Box 2008 MS 6430, Oak Ridge, 37831-6430, Tennessee, USA

    B. Lake

  2. Department of Condensed Matter Physics, University of Oxford, Clarendon Laboratory Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PU, UK

    B. Lake

  3. CEA (MDN/SPSMS/DRFMC), 17 Ave. des Martyrs, Grenoble, Cedex 9, 38054, France

    H. M. Rønnow

  4. Materials Research Department, Risø National Laboratory, Roskilde, 4000, Denmark

    N. B. Christensen, G. Aeppli, K. Lefmann & D. F. McMorrow

  5. Ørsted Laboratory, Niels Bohr Institute for APG, Universitetsparken 5, Copenhagen, DK 2100, Denmark

    N. B. Christensen

  6. NEC Research Institute, 4 Independence Way, Princeton, 08540-6634, New Jersey, USA

    G. Aeppli

  7. BENSC, Hahn-Meitner Institut, Glienicker Strasse 100, Berlin, 14109, Germany

    P. Vorderwisch & P. Smeibidl

  8. Department of Advanced Materials Science, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, University of Tokyo, Hongo 7-3-1, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-8656, Japan

    N. Mangkorntong, T. Sasagawa, M. Nohara & H. Takagi

  9. Experimental Facilities Division, Spallation Neutron Source, 701 Scarboro Road, Oak Ridge, 37830, Tennessee, USA

    T. E. Mason

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Correspondence to B. Lake.

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Lake, B., Rønnow, H., Christensen, N. et al. Antiferromagnetic order induced by an applied magnetic field in a high-temperature superconductor. Nature 415, 299–302 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/415299a

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