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Title: Use of Kramers-Kronig relations to extract the conductivity of high-[ital T][sub [ital c]] superconductors from optical data

Journal Article · · Physical Review, B: Condensed Matter; (United States)
;  [1]
  1. Department of Physics, University of California, and Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720 (United States)

In principle the conductivity of the cuprate superconductors can be obtained from reflectivity measurements using the Kramers-Kronig-transform technique. However, at low temperatures and for frequencies below [similar to]300 cm[sup [minus]1] the reflectivities of materials such as YBa[sub 2]Cu[sub 3]O[sub 7] are close to unity. Uncertainty in the precise signal level corresponding to unity reflectivity and a lack of knowledge of the reflectivity below the lowest measured frequency cause this method to become unreliable. To address this problem we have used a bolometric technique and a resonant technique to obtain accurate submillimeter and microwave data for the residual losses in epitaxial thin films of YBa[sub 2]Cu[sub 3]O[sub 7] at low temperatures. The Kramers-Kronig analysis of our data is in good agreement with results from fitting our data to simple weakly coupled grain and two-fluid models for the [ital a]-[ital b] plane conductivity. However, below 450 cm[sup [minus]1] it is in disagreement with some published results of other workers obtained from Kramers-Kronig analysis of reflectivity data. To understand this discrepancy we analyze how the conductivity determined by the Kramers-Kronig-transform technique depends on some commonly used low-frequency extrapolations of reflectivity data.

DOE Contract Number:
AC03-76SF00098
OSTI ID:
6608642
Journal Information:
Physical Review, B: Condensed Matter; (United States), Vol. 47:18; ISSN 0163-1829
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English