What do we learn from impurities and disorder in High Tc cuprates?

Abstract: We established that the morphology of the phase diagrams is mostly governed by disorder in the various cuprate families. In the minimally disordered YBCO substitutions of Zn or Li spinless impurities on the planar Cu sites control the extent of the spin glass phase and superconducting (SC) dome. NMR data establish that these defects induce in their vicinity a cloud with a Kondo like paramagnetic behavior that differs markedly between the pseudogap and strange metal regimes. We have studied the evolution of transport properties with disorder by introduction of a controlled content of in plane vacancies by electron irradiation. At high T the inelastic scattering of the carriers is surprisingly disorder independent, and governed by the excitations of the correlated electronic state. The low T upturns of the resistivity, that are associated with single impurity Kondo like scattering, agree qualitatively with the local magnetism induced by spinless impurities. Very large defect contents are required to induce Metal Insulator Crossovers. In the SC state, the defect induced reduction of Tc scales quasi linearly with residual resistivity. The paraconductivity due to SC fluctuations, deduced from high field magnetoresistance measurements vanishes beyond a temperature T//c and a field H//c that decrease with increasing defect content. In the pseudogap regime the weaker decrease of T//c with respect to that of Tc reveals a loss of SC phase coherence in presence of disorder. This initiates a discussion of its interplay with pair breaking and allows us to confirm that the family specific dopant induced disorder or order controls the phase diagram. In the ideal disorder free cuprate the 2D SC state would certainly persist at low doping. This ensemble of data provides serious challenges for the theoretical understanding of superconductivity and the normal state in these SC correlated electron systems.