Image of the Energy Gap Anisotropy in the Vibrational Spectum of a High Temperature Superconductor

Abstract

We present a new method of determining the anisotropy of the gap function in layered high-Tc superconductors. Careful inelastic neutron scattering measurements at low temperature of the phonon dispersion curves in the (100) direction in La_(1.85)Sr_(.15)CuO_4 would determine whether the gap is predominately s-wave or d-wave. We also propose an experiment to determine the gap at each point on a quasi-two-dimensional Fermi surface.