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Reduced Hall carrier density in the overdoped strange metal regime of cuprate superconductors

Nature Physics volume 17, pages 826–831 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Efforts to understand the microscopic origin of superconductivity in the cuprates are dependent on knowledge of the normal state. The Hall number in the low-temperature, high-field limit nH(0) has a particular importance because, within conventional transport theory, it is simply related to the number of charge carriers, so its evolution with doping gives crucial information about the nature of the charge transport. Here we report a study of the high-field Hall coefficient of the single-layer cuprates Tl2Ba2CuO6+δ (Tl2201) and (Pb/La)-doped Bi2Sr2CuO6+δ (Bi2201), which shows how nH(0) evolves in the overdoped—so-called strange metal—regime of cuprates. We find that nH(0) increases smoothly from p to 1 + p, where p is the number of holes doped into the parent insulating state, over a wide range of doping. The evolution of nH correlates with the emergence of the anomalous linear-in-temperature term in the low-temperature in-plane resistivity. The results could suggest that quasiparticle decoherence extends to dopings well beyond the pseudogap regime.

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Fig. 1: Field dependence of the Hall coefficient for Tl2201.
Fig. 2: Evolution of the Hall number with temperature and doping for Tl2201 and Bi2201.
Fig. 3: Doping dependence of the low-temperature Hall number and linear-in-T component of resistivity for Tl2201 and Bi2201.

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Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank B. Arnold and P. Rourke for their contributions to the Bi2201 measurements and J. Tallon for useful discussions. This work was supported by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council grants EP/R011141/1, EP/K016709/1 and EP/L015544/1, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) grant 16METL01 ‘Strange Metals’ and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 835279-Catch-22). W.T. acknowledges support from the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange under the ‘Polish Returns 2019’ programme, grant PPN/PPO/2019/1/00014/U/0001. We also acknowledge support from HFML-RU/FOM, HLD-HZDR and LNCMI-CNRS, members of the European Magnetic Field Laboratory (EMFL).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. H.H. Wills Physics Laboratory, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Carsten Putzke, Jake Ayres, Liam Malone, Nigel E. Hussey & Antony Carrington

  2. Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Intenses (LNCMI-EMFL) (CNRS-INSA-UGA-UPS), Toulouse, France

    Siham Benhabib & Wojciech Tabis

  3. AGH University of Science and Technology, Faculty of Physics and Applied Computer Science, Krakow, Poland

    Wojciech Tabis

  4. Hochfeld-Magnetlabor Dresden (HLD-EMFL), Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Dresden, Germany

    Zhaosheng Wang

  5. High Field Magnet Laboratory (HFML-EMFL) and Institute for Molecules and Materials, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Salvatore Licciardello, Jianming Lu & Nigel E. Hussey

  6. Institute for Solid State Physics, University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Japan

    Takeshi Kondo

  7. Toyota Technological Institute, Nagoya, Japan

    Tsunehiro Takeuchi

  8. Department of Physics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    John R. Cooper

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  1. Carsten Putzke
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Contributions

The project was conceived by A.C., C.P. and N.E.H. Pulsed field measurements on Tl2201 were performed by C.P. and Z.W. at HLD–Dresden and by C.P., S.B., W.T. and J.A. at LNCMI–Toulouse. J.L. and S.L. contributed to the Hall effect measurement on Bi2201 at HMFL–Nijmegen. Samples of Tl2201 were grown by L.M. and J.R.C. Samples of Bi2201 were grown by T.K. and T.T. A.C. performed the numerical simulations of RH(T, H). The manuscript was written by A.C. and N.E.H., with input from all the co-authors.

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Correspondence to Carsten Putzke, Nigel E. Hussey or Antony Carrington.

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Supplementary Information

Methods including Supplementary Table 1 and Figs. 1–6, description of simulation including Figs. 7 and 8 and comparison to other compounds including Figs. 9 and 10.

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Putzke, C., Benhabib, S., Tabis, W. et al. Reduced Hall carrier density in the overdoped strange metal regime of cuprate superconductors. Nat. Phys. 17, 826–831 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-021-01197-0

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