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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Terahertz phase slips in striped La2−xBaxCuO4

D. Fu1, D. Nicoletti1, M. Fechner1, M. Buzzi1, G. D. Gu2, and A. Cavalleri1,3,*

  • 1Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, 22761 Hamburg, Germany
  • 2Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973, USA
  • 3Department of Physics, Clarendon Laboratory, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3PU, United Kingdom

  • *andrea.cavalleri@mpsd.mpg.de
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Phys. Rev. B 105, L020502 – Published 18 January, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.105.L020502

Abstract

Interlayer transport in high-TC cuprates is mediated by superconducting tunneling across the CuO2 planes. For this reason, the terahertz frequency optical response is dominated by one or more Josephson plasma resonances and becomes highly nonlinear at fields for which the tunneling supercurrents approach their critical value IC. These large terahertz nonlinearities are in fact a hallmark of superconducting transport. Surprisingly, however, they have been documented in La2−xBaxCuO4 (LBCO) also above TC for doping values near x=18 and interpreted as an indication of superfluidity in the stripe phase. Here, electric-field-induced second harmonic is used to study the dynamics of time-dependent interlayer voltages when LBCO is driven with large-amplitude terahertz pulses, in search of other characteristic signatures of Josephson tunneling in the normal state. We show that this method is sensitive to the voltage anomalies associated with 2π Josephson phase slips, which near x=18 are observed both below and above TC. These results document a regime of nonlinear transport that shares features of fluctuating stripes and superconducting phase dynamics.

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Phys. Rev. B 105, L020502– Published 18 January, 2022
  • Received 16 September 2021
  • Revised 2 December 2021
  • Accepted 3 January 2022
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.

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