Intrinsic coherence length anisotropy in nickelate, and some pnictide, and chalcogenide superconductors

Abstract

Nickelate superconductors, ${R_{1-x}}{A_x}Ni{O_2}$ (where R is a rare earth metal and A = Sr, Ca), experimentally discovered in 2019 exhibit many unexplained mysteries as the existence of a superconducting state with $T_c$ up to 18 K in thin films and its absence in bulk materials. Another unexplained mystery of nickelates is their temperature-dependent upper critical field, $B_{c2}(T)$, which can be nicely fitted to two-dimensional (2D) models; however the deduced film thickness, $d_{sc,GL}$, exceeds the physical film thickness, $d_{sc}$, by a manifold. To address the latter, it should be noted that 2D models assume that $d_{sc}$ is less than the in-plane, $\xi_{ab}(0)$, and out-of-plane, $\xi_{c}(0)$, ground state coherence lengths, respectively, and, in addition, that the inequality $\xi_{c}(0) < \xi_{ab}(0)$ satisfies. Analysis of the reported experimental $B_{c2}(T)$ data showed that at least one of these conditions does not satisfy for ${R_{1-x}}{A_x}Ni{O_2}$ films. This implies that nickelate films are not 2D superconductors, even despite though that the superconducting state is observed only in thin films. Based on this, here we proposed analytical three dimensional (3D) model for global data fit of in-plane and out-of-plane $B_{c2}(T)$ in nickelates. The model is based on a heuristic expression for temperature dependent coherence length anisotropy, $\gamma_{\xi}(T)$. The proposed expression for $\gamma_{\xi}(T)$, perhaps, has a much broader application because it has been successfully applied to some bulk pnictide and chalcogenide superconductors.