Hyperfine fields at the Ba site in the antiferromagnet YBa2Cu3O6.05

Absence of orbital currents in superconducting YBa2Cu4O8 using a zeeman-perturbed nuclear-quadrupole-resonance technique

Zeeman perturbed nuclear quadrupole resonance was applied to evaluate weak magnetic fields in the context of orbital currents in cuprate superconductors. The magnetic environment of the barium atom in c-axis oriented powder samples of YBa(2)Cu(4)O(8) was investigated in the pseudogap phase at 90 K. No evidence for orbital currents was found: any static and dynamic field must be less than 0.07 and 0.7 mT, respectively.

Anomalous ordering in inhomogeneously strained materials

We study a continuous quasi-two-dimensional order-disorder phase transition that occurs in a simple model of a material that is inhomogeneously strained due to the presence of dislocation lines. Performing Monte Carlo simulations of different system sizes and using finite size scaling, we measure critical exponents describing the transition of β=0.18±0.02, γ=1.0±0.1, and α=0.10±0.02. Comparable exponents have been reported in a variety of physical systems. These systems undergo a range of different types of phase transitions, including structural transitions, exciton percolation, and magnetic ordering. In particular, similar exponents have been found to describe the development of magnetic order at the onset of the pseudogap transition in high-temperature superconductors. Their common universal critical exponents suggest that the essential physics of the transition in all of these physical systems is the same as in our simple model. We argue that the nature of the transition in our model is related to surface transitions although our model has no free surface.