Destruction of the Fermi Surface in Underdoped High Tc Superconductors

Details Destruction of the Fermi Surface in Underdoped High Tc Superconductors Destruction of the Fermi Surface in Underdoped High Tc Superconductors

1997-10-15

arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9710163v2

Nature 392, 157 (1998)

Physics

Condensed Matter

Superconductivity

4 pages, revtex, 5 eps figures, minor changes (note, a and c should be interchanged in upper right panel of old Fig. 2), accep

Scientific paper

10.1038/32366

The Fermi surface is a central concept in the theory of metals. Even though the optimally doped high temperature superconductors exhibit an anomalous normal state, angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) has revealed a large Fermi surface despite the absence of well-defined quasiparticles and the necessity of working at finite temperatures. However, the even more unusual behavior in the underdoped high temperature superconductors, which show a pseudogap above Tc, requires us to carefully re-examine this concept. Here, we present the first results on how the Fermi surface is destroyed as a function of temperature in underdoped Bi2212 using ARPES. We find the remarkable effect that different k points become gapped at different temperatures. This leads to a break up of the Fermi surface at a temperature T* into disconnected Fermi arcs which shrink with decreasing T, eventually collapsing to the point nodes of the dx2-y2 superconducting ground state below Tc. This novel behavior, where the Fermi surface does not form a continuous contour in momentum space, is unprecedented in that it occurs in the absence of long range order. Moreover, although the d-wave superconducting gap below Tc smoothly evolves into the pseudogap above Tc, the gaps at different k points are not related to one another above Tc the same way as they are below, implying an intimate, but non-trivial relation, between the two.

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