Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Berg, E.
We construct a 2-leg ladder model of an Fe-pnictide superconductor and discuss its properties and relationship with the familiar 2-leg cuprate model. Our results suggest that the underlying pairing mechanism for the Fe-pnictide superconductors is similar to that for the cuprates.
In the stripe-ordered state of a strongly-correlated two-dimensional electronic system, under a set of special circumstances, the superconducting condensate, like the magnetic order, can occur at a non-zero wave-vector corresponding to a spatial period double that of the charge order. In this case, the Josephson coupling between near neighbor planes, especially in a crystal with the special structure of La{sub 2-x}Ba{sub x}CuO{sub 4}, vanishes identically. We propose that this is the underlying cause of the dynamical decoupling of the layers recently observed in transport measurements at x = 1/8.
Superconductivity has recently been discovered in Pr{sub 2}Ba{sub 4}Cu{sub 7}O{sub 15-{delta}} with a maximum T{sub c} of about 15K. Since the CuO planes in this material are believed to be insulating, it has been proposed that the superconductivity occurs in the double (or zigzag) CuO chain layer. On phenomenological grounds we propose a theoretical interpretation of the experimental results in terms of a new phase for the zigzag chain, labelled by C{sub 1}S{sub 3/2}. This phase has a gap in the relative charge mode and a partial gap in the relative spin mode. It has gapless uniform charge and spin excitations and can have a divergent superconducting susceptibility, even for repulsive interactions. A microscopic model for the zigzag CuO chain is proposed, and on the basis of density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) and bosonization studies, we adduce evidence that supports our proposal.