Orbital and spin effects for the upper critical field in As-deficient disordered Fe pnictide superconductors

We report upper critical field Bc2(T) data for LaO0.9F0.1FeAs1- δ in a wide temperature and field range up to 60 T. The large slope of Bc2≈- 5.4 to -6.6 T K-1 near an improved Tc≈28.5 K of the in-plane Bc2(T) contrasts with a flattening starting near 23 K above 30 T we regard as the onset of Pauli-limited behaviour (PLB) with Bc2(0)≈63–68 T. We interpret a similar hitherto unexplained flattening of the Bc2(T) curves reported for at least three other disordered closely related systems, Co-doped BaFe2As2, (Ba,K) Fe2As2 and NdO0.7F0.3FeAs (all single crystals), for applied fields H∥(a,b), also as a manifestation of PLB. Their Maki parameters have been estimated by analysing their Bc2(T) data within the Werthamer–Helfand–Hohenberg approach. The pronounced PLB of (Ba, K)Fe2As2 single crystals obtained from an Sn flux is attributed also to a significant As deficiency detected by wavelength dispersive x-ray spectroscopy as reported by Ni et al (2008 Phys. Rev. B 78 014507). Consequences of our results are discussed in terms of disorder effects within conventional superconductivity (CSC) and unconventional superconductivity (USC). USC scenarios with nodes on individual Fermi surface sheets (FSS), e.g. p- and d-wave SC, can be discarded for our samples. The increase of dBc2/dT|Tc by sizeable disorder provides evidence for an important intraband (intra-FSS) contribution to the orbital upper critical field. We suggest that it can be ascribed either to an impurity-driven transition from s± USC to CSC of an extended s++-wave state or to a stabilized s±-state provided As-vacancies cause predominantly strong intraband scattering in the unitary limit. We compare our results with Bc2 data from the literature, which often show no PLB for fields below 60–70 T probed so far. A novel disorder-related scenario of a complex interplay of SC with two different competing magnetic instabilities is suggested.