Friday, July 19, 2013

Unified phase diagram for iron and cuprate superconductors

At the workshop this week Luca de' Medici gave a nice talk, based on work described in a preprint Selective Mottness as a key to iron superconductors with Gianluca Giovannetti, Massimo Capone

They argue that the best way to understand the iron superconductors is in terms of Hund's rule coupling and the total orbital filling. Thus the "parent compounds" which are antiferromagnetic should be viewed as being at 0.2 doping because they have 5 electrons in 3 degenerate iron orbitals. If one airbrushes out the antiferromagnetic phase one is left with the phase diagram below.
This has a rather striking resemblance to the cuprate phase diagram (!), particularly when the pseudogap phase can be viewed as a "momentum selective" Mott insulator.

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