Local suppression of superconductivity in Zn-substituted high Tc cuprates

The strong suppression of Tc in high Tc cuprate superconductors (HTSCs) is often described with a mean-field (MF) pair-breaking model. Here, we present μSR data which show that this picture fails to describe simultaneously the dependences of Tc and ns/m∗ (superconducting carrier density/effective mass) on yab, the planar density of Zn impurities. Instead, the experimental results are very well described by a “Swiss-cheese” model, where carriers within an ab-plane coherence length ξab around each Zn are excluded from the superfluid, resulting in the reduction of ns. [1].