Abstract
The Nernst effect in metals is highly sensitive to two kinds of phase transition: superconductivity and density-wave order1. The large, positive Nernst signal observed in hole-doped high-Tc superconductors2 above their transition temperature (Tc) has so far been attributed to fluctuating superconductivity3. Here we report that in some of these materials the large Nernst signal is in fact the result of stripe order, a form of spin/charge modulation4 that causes a reconstruction of the Fermi surface5. In La2-xSr x CuO4 (LSCO) doped with Nd or Eu, the onset of stripe order causes the Nernst signal to change from being small and negative to being large and positive, as revealed either by lowering the hole concentration across the quantum critical point in Nd-doped LSCO (refs 6–8) or by lowering the temperature across the ordering temperature in Eu-doped LSCO (refs 9, 10). In the second case, two separate peaks are resolved, respectively associated with the onset of stripe order at high temperature and superconductivity near Tc.
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References
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Acknowledgements
We thank K. Behnia, S. Sachdev and A.-M. S. Tremblay for discussions, and J. Corbin for his assistance with the experiments. J.C. is supported by a Fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation. J.-S.Z. and J.B.G. were supported by a US National Science Foundation grant. H.T. acknowledges MEXT Japan for a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research. L.T. acknowledges support from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and funding from the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Nature et les Technologies and a Canada Research Chair.
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Cyr-Choinière, O., Daou, R., Laliberté, F. et al. Enhancement of the Nernst effect by stripe order in a high-Tc superconductor. Nature 458, 743–745 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature07931
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature07931
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