Diffusion of nonequilibrium quasi-particles in a cuprate superconductor

N Gedik; J Orenstein; Ruixing Liang; D A Bonn; W N Hardy

doi:10.1126/science.1083038

Diffusion of nonequilibrium quasi-particles in a cuprate superconductor

Science. 2003 May 30;300(5624):1410-2. doi: 10.1126/science.1083038.

Authors

N Gedik¹, J Orenstein, Ruixing Liang, D A Bonn, W N Hardy

Affiliation

¹ Physics Department, University of California, Berkeley, and Materials Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.

PMID: 12775834
DOI: 10.1126/science.1083038

Abstract

We report a transport study of nonequilibrium quasi-particles in a high-transition-temperature cuprate superconductor using the transient grating technique. Low-intensity laser excitation (at a photon energy of 1.5 electron volts) was used to introduce a spatially periodic density of quasi-particles into a high-quality untwinned single crystal of YBa2Cu3O6.5. Probing the evolution of the initial density through space and time yielded the quasi-particle diffusion coefficient and the inelastic and elastic scattering rates. The technique reported here is potentially applicable to precision measurements of quasi-particle dynamics not only in cuprate superconductors but in other electronic systems as well.