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Updated: Jul 16, 2026

All-electronic Nanosecond-resolved Scanning Tunneling Microscopy: Facilitating the Investigation of Single Dopant Charge Dynamics
Published on: January 19, 2018
Correlating off-stoichiometric doping and nanoscale electronic inhomogeneity in the high-Tc superconductor
Sen Zhou1, Hong Ding, Ziqiang Wang
1Department of Physics, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 02467, USA.
Abstract:
A microscopic theory is presented for the observed electronic disorder in superconducting Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+delta. The essential phenomenology is shown to be consistent with the existence of two types of interstitial oxygen dopants: those serving primarily as charge reservoirs and those close to the apical plane contributing both carriers and electrostatic potential to the CuO2 plane. The nonlinear screening of the latter produces nanoscale variations in the doped hole concentration, leading to electronic inhomogeneity. Based on an unrestricted Gutzwiller approximation of the extended t-J model, we provide a consistent explanation of the correlation between the observed dopant location and the pairing gap and its spatial evolutions. We show that the oxygen dopants are the primary cause of both the pairing gap disorder and the quasiparticle interference pattern.
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