The Effect of Uniaxial Pressure on the High-Temperature Superconductor YBa₂Cu₃O_7−x

The phase diagram of the high-temperature cuprate superconductors encompasses a variety of intertwined phases. Typically the phase diagram is traversed using chemical doping or magnetic field, but uniaxial pressure offers an alternative clean tuning parameter. Recently, large a-axis uniaxial pressures in YBa₂Cu₃O_6.67 have been shown to stabilise a three-dimensional long-range-ordered charge density wave, analogous to that achieved with large c-axis magnetic fields, but at zero field [1]. Using GaAs-based Hall probe susceptometers, we have investigated the strain dependence of ∼1/8-doped YBCO with high spatial precision, up to pressures of at least 1.5 GPa, crossing the transition into long-range CDW order.

[1] H.-H. Kim, S.-M. Souliou, M. E. Barber, E. Lefrançois, M. Minola, M. Tortora, R. Heid, N. Nandi, R. A. Borzi, G. Garbarino, A. Bosak, J. Porras, T. Loew, M. König, P. J. W. Moll, A. P. Mackenzie, B. Keimer, C. W. Hicks, and M. Le Tacon, Science in press (2018)