Bismuthates Superconductors Appear To Be Conventional

A lot of people overlooked the fact that during the early days of the discovery of high-Tc superconductors, there was another "family" of superconductors beyond just the cuprates (i.e. those compounds having copper-oxide layers). These compounds are called bismuthates, where instead of having copper-oxide layers, they have bismuth-oxide layers. Otherwise, their crystal structures are similar to the cuprates.

They didn't make that much of a noise at that time because Tc for this family of material tends to be lower than the cuprates. And, even back then, there were already evidence that the bismuthates superconductors might be "boring", i.e. the results that they have produced looked like they might be a conventional superconductor. This is supported by several experiments, including a tunneling experiment[1] that showed that the phonon density of states obtained from tunneling data matches that of the density of states obtained from neutron scattering.

Now it seems that there is more evidence that the bismuthates are conventional BCS superconductors, and it comes from ARPES experiment[2]. There have been no ARPES measurement done on bismuthates before this because it had been a serious challenge to get a single-crystal of this compound large enough to perform such an experiment. But obviously, large-enough single-crystals have been synthesized.

In this latest experiment, they look at the band structure of this compound, and extract, among others, the strong electron-phonon coupling that matches the superconducting gap. This strongly indicates that phonons are the "glue" in the superconducting mechanism for this compound.

So this adds another piece of the puzzle for the whole mystery of the origin of superconductivity in the cuprates. Certainly, having similar layered crystal structure does not discount being a conventional superconductor. Yet, the cuprates have very different behavior when we perform tunneling and ARPES experiments, and they certainly have higher Tc's.

The mystery continues.

Zz.

[1] Q. Huang et al. Nature v347, p369 (1990).
[2] CHP. Wen et al. PRL  121, 117002 (2018). https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.10507