Phonon density of states and superconductivity in Nd1.85Ce0.15CuO4.

Abstract

Inelastic-neutron-scattering techniques have been used to measure the generalized phonon density of states in superconducting ${\mathrm{Nd}}_{1.85}$${\mathrm{Ce}}_{0.15}$${\mathrm{CuO}}_{4}$. There is reasonable agreement at low energies between our measurements and recent point-contact-tunneling density-of-states measurements reported by Huang et al., which suggests that phonons play a major role in pairing in the electron-superconductor systems. The correspondence at higher energies, however, is not particularly good, but probably reflects the difficulty in obtaining quantitative tunneling data.