Redetermination of the crystal structure of RhPb from single-crystal X-ray diffraction data, revealing a rhodium deficiency.

RhPb (rhodium dilead) is a superconductor crystallizing in the CuAl structure type (space group 4/). The Rh and Pb atoms are located at the 4 (site symmetry 422) and 8 (.2) sites, respectively.

Large Magnetovolume Effect Induced by Embedding Ferromagnetic Clusters into Antiferromagnetic Matrix of Cobaltite Perovskite.

Materials that show negative thermal expansion (NTE) have significant industrial merit because they can be used to fabricate composites whose dimensions remain invariant upon heating. In some materials, NTE is concomitant with the spontaneous magnetization due to the magnetovolume effect (MVE). Here the authors report a new class of MVE material; namely, a layered perovskite PrBaCo O (0 ≤ x ≤ 0.

Quasi-particles ultrafastly releasing kink bosons to form Fermi arcs in a cuprate superconductor.

In a conventional framework, superconductivity is lost at a critical temperature (Tc) because, at higher temperatures, gluing bosons can no longer bind two electrons into a Cooper pair. In high-Tc cuprates, it is still unknown how superconductivity vanishes at Tc. We provide evidence that the so-called ≲ 70-meV kink bosons that dress the quasi-particle excitations are playing a key role in the loss of superconductivity in a cuprate.

Oscillatory behavior of vortex-lattice melting transition line in mesoscopic Bi_{2}Sr_{2}CaCu_{2}O_{8+y} superconductors.

The vortex-lattice melting transition of a limited number of vortices confined in mesoscopic square superconductors was studied by c-axis resistance measurements using stacks of intrinsic Josephson junctions in Bi_{2}Sr_{2}CaCu_{2}O_{8+y}. In contrast to the melting transition in bulk crystals, we have first found a clear oscillatory behavior in the field dependence of the melting temperature in small samples of 5-10  μm square. The periods of the oscillations roughly obey the regularity of the matching conditions of square vortex lattices surrounded by a square boundary and the melting temperatures are enhanced around the vortex number of i^{2} (where i is an integer).