The effect of exceptionally high fluorine doping on the anisotropy of single crystalline SmFeAsO1-xFx

Abstract

We succeeded in growing single crystalline SmFeAsO1-xFx with exceptionally high fluorine concentration by using a CsCl flux method. Comparing to conventional flux methods, this method can introduce about double the amount of fluorine into the oxygen site. The obtained single crystal shows the highest superconducting transition temperature (Tc = 57.5 K) in single crystalline iron pnictides. In addition, the residual resistivity ratio (RRR) is almost three times as large as that of previously reported single crystals. This suggests that our single crystals are suitable for investigation of the intrinsic superconducting properties since they have few defects and impurities. Using both the Werthamer-Helfand-Hohenberg model and the effective mass model, we demonstrated that a higher fluorine concentration suppresses the anisotropic superconductivity of SmFeAsO1-xFx.