Electrostatic modulation of the superfluid density in an ultrathin film.

By capacitively charging an underdoped ultrathin La2-xSrxCuO4 film with an electric field applied across a gate insulator with a high dielectric constant, relative changes of the areal superfluid density ns of unprecedented strength were observed in measurements of the film kinetic inductance. Although ns appears to be substantially reduced by disorder, the data provide, for the first time on the same sample, direct compelling evidence for the Uemura relation Tc proportional to ns(T=0) in the underdoped regime of copper-oxide superconductors.

Collective pinning of a frozen vortex liquid in ultrathin superconducting YBa2Cu3O7 films.

The linear dynamic response of the two-dimensional (2D) vortex medium in ultrathin YBa2Cu3O7 films was studied by measuring their ac sheet impedance Z over a broad range of frequencies omega. With decreasing temperature the dissipative component of Z exhibits, at a temperature T*(omega) well above the melting temperature of a 2D vortex crystal, a crossover from a thermally activated regime involving single vortices to a regime where the response has features consistent with a description in terms of a collectively pinned vortex manifold. This suggests the idea of a vortex liquid which, below T*(omega), appears to be frozen at the time scales 1/omega of the experiments.