Abstract
Copper oxide superconductors continue to fascinate the communities of condensed matter physics and material sciences because they host the highest ambient-pressure superconducting transition temperature and unconventional electronic behaviour that are not fully explained1–3. Searching for universal links between the superconducting state and its normal metallic state is believed to be an effective approach to elucidate the underlying mechanism of superconductivity. One of the common expectations for copper oxide superconductors is that a metallic phase will appear after the superconductivity is entirely suppressed by chemical doping4–8 or the application of a magnetic field9. Here we report the first observation of a quantum phase transition from a superconducting state to an insulating-like state as a function of pressure in Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ (Bi2212) superconductors with two CuO2 planes in a unit cell for doping below, at and above a level that achieves the highest transition temperature. We also find the same phenomenon in related compounds with a single CuO2 plane as well as three CuO2 planes in a unit cell. This apparently universal phenomenon poses a challenge for achieving a unified understanding of the mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity.
Highlights
A huge body of experimental work has been reported for copper oxide superconductors since they were discovered more than thirty years ago[10,11], the correlation between the superconducting state and its normal state or the neighbouring ground state is still widely debated[2,6,12,13,14]
It is important to recognize that once the superconducting state is completely suppressed by chemical doping, the material undergoes a quantum phase transition from a superconducting state to a metallic state[16,17,18]
We studied samples that have been investigated broadly by a variety of methods[24,27,28,29,30,31], namely, the under-doped (UD), optimally doped (OP) and over-doped (OD) Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ (Bi2212) superconductors with two CuO2 planes in a unit cell
Summary
A huge body of experimental work has been reported for copper oxide (cuprate) superconductors since they were discovered more than thirty years ago[10,11], the correlation between the superconducting state and its normal state or the neighbouring ground state is still widely debated[2,6,12,13,14]. These results exclude the possibility that the insulating-like state is associated with some pressure-induced cracks and provides a reasonable explanation on the reversible superconducting transition with a zero-resistance state.
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