Coexistence of static magnetism and superconductivity in SmFeAsO1-xFx as revealed by muon spin rotation
cond-mat.supr-con
/ Authors
A. J. Drew, Ch. Niedermayer, P. J. Baker, F. L. Pratt, S. J. Blundell, T. Lancaster, R. H. Liu, G. Wu, X. H. Chen, I. Watanabe
and 6 more authors
V. K. Malik, A. Dubroka, M. Roessle, K. W. Kim, C. Baines, C. Bernhard
/ Abstract
The recent observation of superconductivity with critical temperatures up to 55 K in the FeAs based pnictide compounds marks the first discovery of a non copper-oxide based layered high-Tc superconductor (HTSC) [1-3]. It has raised the suspicion that these new materials share a similar pairing mechanism to the cuprates, since both exhibit superconductivity following charge doping of a magnetic parent material. Here we present a muon spin rotation study on SmFeAsO1-xFx (x=0-0.30), which shows that static magnetism persists well into the superconducting regime. The analogy with the cuprates is quite surprising since the parent compounds appear to have different magnetic ground states: itinerant spin density wave for the pnictides contrasted with the Mott-Hubbard insulator in the cuprates. Our findings suggest that proximity to magnetic order and associated soft magnetic fluctuations, rather than the strong electronic correlations in the vicinity of a Mott-Hubbard-metal-to-insulator transition, may be the key ingredients of HTSC.