High temperature superconductivity emerges in unique materials, like cuprates, that belong to the class of heterostructures at atomic limit, made of a superlattice of superconducting atomic layers intercalated by spacer layers. The physical properties of a strongly correlated electronic system, emerge from the competition between different phases with a resulting inhomogeneity from nanoscale to micron scale. Here we focus on the spatial arrangements of two types of structural defects in the cuprate La2CuO4+y : i) the local lattice distortions in the CuO2 active layers and ii) the lattice distortions around the charged chemical dopants in the spacer layers. We use a new advanced microscopy method: scanning nano X-ray diffraction (nXRD). We show here that local lattice distortions form incommensurate nanoscale ripples spatially anticorrelated with puddles of self-organized chemical dopants in the spacer layers.
@article{arxiv.1212.2738,
title = {Competing striped structures in La2CuO4+y},
author = {Nicola Poccia and Alessandro Ricci and Gaetano Campi and Alessabdra Stella Caporale and Antonio Bianconi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1212.2738},
year = {2013}
}