We report muon spin rotation and magnetic susceptibility experiments on in-plane stress effects on the static spin-stripe order and superconductivity in the cuprate system La2-xBaxCuO4 with x = 0.115. An extremely low uniaxial stress of 0.1 GPa induces a substantial decrease in the magnetic volume fraction and a dramatic rise in the onset of 3D superconductivity, from 10 to 32 K; however, the onset of at-least-2D superconductivity is much less sensitive to stress. These results show not only that large-volume-fraction spin-stripe order is anti-correlated with 3D superconducting (SC) coherence, but also that these states are energetically very finely balanced. Moreover, the onset temperatures of 3D superconductivity and spin-stripe order are very similar in the large stress regime. These results strongly suggest a similar pairing mechanism for spin-stripe order, the spatially-modulated 2D and uniform 3D SC orders, imposing an important constraint on theoretical models.
@article{arxiv.2008.01159,
title = {Using uniaxial stress to probe the relationship between competing superconducting states in a cuprate with spin-stripe order},
author = {Z. Guguchia and D. Das and C. N. Wang and T. Adachi and N. Kitajima and M. Elender and F. Brückner and S. Ghosh and V. Grinenko and T. Shiroka and M. Müller and C. Mudry and C. Baines and M. Bartkowiak and Y. Koike and A. Amato and J. M. Tranquada and H. -H. Klauss and C. W. Hicks and H. Luetkens},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.01159},
year = {2020}
}