High temperature superconductivity in transition metal oxypnictides: a rare-earth puzzle?
I. A. Nekrasov, Z. V. Pchelkina*, M. V. Sadovskii
Institute for Electrophysics RAS, 620016 Yekaterinburg, Ural Division, Russia
*Institute for Metal Physics RAS, 620041 Yekaterinburg GSP-170, Ural Division, Russia
PACS: 71.20.-b, 74.25.Jb, 74.70.-b
Abstract
We have performed an extensive ab initio LDA and LSDA+U
calculations of electronic structure of newly discovered high-temperature
superconducting series ReO1-xFxFeAs (Re=La,Ce, Pr, Nd, Sm and
hypothetical case of Re=Y). In all cases we obtain almost identical
electronic spectrum (both energy dispersions and the densities of states) in
rather wide energy interval (about 2 eV) around the Fermi level. We also
clain that this fact is unlikely to be changed by the account of strong
correlations.
It leads inevitably to the same critical temperature Tc of superconducting
transition in any theoretical BCS-like mechanism of Cooper pair formation.
We argue that the experimentally observed variations of Tc for different
rare-earth substitutions are either due to disorder effects or less probably
because of possible changes
in spin-fluctuation spectrum of FeAs layers caused by magnetic interactions
with rare-earth spins in ReO layers.