Phase-resolved Higgs response in superconducting cuprates

Hao Chu, Min Jae Kim, Kota Katsumi, Sergey Kovalev, Robert David Dawson, Lukas Schwarz, Naotaka Yoshikawa, Gideok Kim, Daniel Putzky, Zhi Zhong Li, Hélène Raffy, Semyon Germanskiy, Jan Christoph Deinert, Nilesh Awari, Igor Ilyakov, Bertram Green, Min Chen, Mohammed Bawatna, Georg Cristiani, Gennady LogvenovYann Gallais, Alexander V. Boris, Bernhard Keimer, Andreas P. Schnyder, Dirk Manske, Michael Gensch, Zhe Wang, Ryo Shimano, Stefan Kaiser*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

100 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In high-energy physics, the Higgs field couples to gauge bosons and fermions and gives mass to their elementary excitations. Experimentally, such couplings can be inferred from the decay product of the Higgs boson, i.e., the scalar (amplitude) excitation of the Higgs field. In superconductors, Cooper pairs bear a close analogy to the Higgs field. Interaction between the Cooper pairs and other degrees of freedom provides dissipation channels for the amplitude mode, which may reveal important information about the microscopic pairing mechanism. To this end, we investigate the Higgs (amplitude) mode of several cuprate thin films using phase-resolved terahertz third harmonic generation (THG). In addition to the heavily damped Higgs mode itself, we observe a universal jump in the phase of the driven Higgs oscillation as well as a non-vanishing THG above Tc. These findings indicate coupling of the Higgs mode to other collective modes and potentially a nonzero pairing amplitude above Tc.

Original languageEnglish
Article number1793
JournalNature Communications
Volume11
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1-Dec-2020
Externally publishedYes

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