Comparison of the transport mechanism in underdoped high-temperature superconductors and in spin ladders

Abstract

Recently, the normal state resistivity of high-temperature superconductors (HTSC) (in particular in La 2− x Sr x CuO 4 single crystals) has been studied extensively in the region below T c by suppressing the superconducting state in high magnetic fields [Y. Ando, G.S. Boebinger, A. Passnet, Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 1995, pp. 4662–4665.]. In the present work, we report on the normal state resistance of underdoped La 2− x Sr x CuO 4 thin films under epitaxial strain [J.P. Locquet, J. Perret, J. Fompeyrine, E. Mächler, J.W. Seo, G. Van Tendeloo, Nature 394, 1998, pp. 453–456.], measured far below T c by applying pulsed fields up to 60 T [F. Herlach, L. Van Bockstal, R. Bogaerts, I. Deckers, G. Heremans, L. Li, G. Pitsi, J. Vanacken, A. Van Esch, Physica B 201, 1994, p. 542.]. We will compare the transport measurements on these HTSCs with transport data reported for the Sr 2.5Ca 11.5Cu 24O 41 spin ladder compound [T. Nagata, M. Uehara, J. Goto, N. Komiya, J. Akimitsu, N. Motoyama, H. Eisaki, S. Uchida, H. Takahashi, N. Nakanishe, N. Môri, Physica C 282–287, 1997, pp. 153–156.]. This comparison leads to an interpretation of the data in terms of the recently proposed 1D quantum transport model and the charge-stripe models [V.V. Moshchalkov, Solid State Commun. 86, 1993, p. 715; V.V. Moshchalkov, Cond-Mat/9802281; V.V. Moshchalkov, L. Trappeniers, J. Vanacken, Europhys. Lett. 46, 1999, pp. 75–81; J. Vanacken, L. Trappeniers, J. Perret, J.-P. Locquet, V.V. Moshchalkov, Y. Bruynseraede, unpublished.].