The microscopic structure of charge density waves in underdoped YBa2Cu3O6.54 revealed by X-ray diffraction

E. M. Forgan (), E. Blackburn, A. T. Holmes, A. K. R. Briffa, J. Chang, L. Bouchenoire, S. D. Brown, Ruixing Liang, D. Bonn, W. N. Hardy, N. B. Christensen, M. V. Zimmermann, M. Hücker and S. M. Hayden
Additional contact information
E. M. Forgan: School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Birmingham
E. Blackburn: School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Birmingham
A. T. Holmes: School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Birmingham
A. K. R. Briffa: School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Birmingham
J. Chang: Physik-Institut, Universität Zürich
L. Bouchenoire: XMaS, European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, B.P. 220, Grenoble F-38043, France
S. D. Brown: XMaS, European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, B.P. 220, Grenoble F-38043, France
Ruixing Liang: University of British Columbia
D. Bonn: University of British Columbia
W. N. Hardy: University of British Columbia
N. B. Christensen: Technical University of Denmark
M. V. Zimmermann: Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY
M. Hücker: Brookhaven National Laboratory
S. M. Hayden: H. H. Wills Physics Laboratory, University of Bristol

Nature Communications, 2015, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract Charge density wave (CDW) order appears throughout the underdoped high-temperature cuprate superconductors, but the underlying symmetry breaking and the origin of the CDW remain unclear. We use X-ray diffraction to determine the microscopic structure of the CDWs in an archetypical cuprate YBa2Cu3O6.54 at its superconducting transition temperature ∼60 K. We find that the CDWs in this material break the mirror symmetry of the CuO2 bilayers. The ionic displacements in the CDWs have two components, which are perpendicular and parallel to the CuO2 planes, and are out of phase with each other. The planar oxygen atoms have the largest displacements, perpendicular to the CuO2 planes. Our results allow many electronic properties of the underdoped cuprates to be understood. For instance, the CDWs will lead to local variations in the electronic structure, giving an explicit explanation of density-wave states with broken symmetry observed in scanning tunnelling microscopy and soft X-ray measurements.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10064 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:6:y:2015:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms10064

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10064

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().