Pseudogap Behavior Revealed in Interlayer Tunneling in Overdoped Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+x
Abstract
We report heating-compensated interlayer tunneling spectroscopy (ITS) performed on stacks of overdoped Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+x intrinsic junctions, where most of bias-induced heating in the ITS was eliminated. The onset temperature of the pseudogap (PG), revealed in the hump structure of the electronic excitation spectra, reached nearly room temperature for our overdoped intrinsic junctions, which represented the genuine PG onset. At a temperature below but close to Tc, both the superconducting coherence peak and the pseudogap hump coexisted, implying that the two gaps are of separate origins. The hump voltage increased below Tc, following the superconducting gap voltage, which led to a conclusion that the hump structure below Tc in our ITS arose from the combined contribution of the quasiparticle spectral weights of two different characters; one of the superconducting state and another of the PG state near the antinodal region.