Physical Review Research (Aug 2024)

Controllable suppression of the unconventional superconductivity in bulk and thin-film Sr_{2}RuO_{4} via high-energy electron irradiation

  • Jacob P. Ruf,
  • Hilary M. L. Noad,
  • Romain Grasset,
  • Ludi Miao,
  • Elina Zhakina,
  • Philippa H. McGuinness,
  • Hari P. Nair,
  • Nathaniel J. Schreiber,
  • Naoki Kikugawa,
  • Dmitry Sokolov,
  • Marcin Konczykowski,
  • Darrell G. Schlom,
  • Kyle M. Shen,
  • Andrew P. Mackenzie

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.6.033178
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 6, no. 3
p. 033178

Abstract

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In bulk Sr_{2}RuO_{4}, the strong sensitivity of the superconducting transition temperature T_{c} to nonmagnetic impurities provides robust evidence for a superconducting order parameter that changes sign around the Fermi surface. In superconducting epitaxial thin-film Sr_{2}RuO_{4}, the relationship between T_{c} and the residual resistivity ρ_{0}, which in bulk samples is taken to be a proxy for the low-temperature elastic scattering rate, is far less clear. Using high-energy electron irradiation to controllably introduce point disorder into bulk single-crystal and thin-film Sr_{2}RuO_{4}, we show that T_{c} is suppressed in both systems at nearly identical rates. This suggests that part of ρ_{0} in films comes from defects that do not contribute to superconducting pairbreaking and establishes a quantitative link between the superconductivity of bulk and thin-film samples.