Electronic nematicity in iron-based superconductors

Emerging evidence for the presence of strongly anisotropic electronic states in the underdoped regime of both cuprate and iron-based high temperature superconductors suggests the possibility of an important role for electronic nematic order in these materials. The central theme of my thesis work has been the experimental study of electronic nematicity in iron-based superconductors via measurement of resistivity anisotropy. To do this, I have developed several new experimental techniques, on the one hand enabling detwinning of sub-mm size single crystals in the broken-symmetry orthorhombic state, and on the other hand revealing the nematic susceptibility in the high-symmetry tetragonal state. A major part of my thesis work has involved measurement of the elastoresistance; that is, the change in the resistance of a material as a consequence of the strains that it experiences. In this thesis, I will show how differential elastoresistance measurements can directly reveal the nematic susceptibility of a material in the tetragonal state. I will introduce the appropriate tensor formalism necessary to describe these measurements, and describe an experimental technique to determine these coefficients using piezoelectric stacks to provide anisotropic bi-axial strain. Results in the tetragonal state of various underdoped families based on the parent compound BaFe2As2 explicitly demonstrate that the tetragonal-to-orthorhombic structural transition in these materials is fundamentally driven by an electronic nematic instability. These results also suggest that the resistivity anisotropy in the paramagnetic orthorhombic state is dominated by the Fermi surface anisotropy, rather than an anisotropy in the scattering rate. Finally, similar measurements of a wide variety of optimally doped iron-pnictides and iron-chalcogenides reveal that a divergence of the nematic susceptibility in the B2g symmetry channel appears to be a generic feature of optimally-doped iron-based superconductors. In addition to the above, I also employ a mechanical detwinning technique to reveal the resistivity anisotropy in the orthorhombic state of the same Fe-based superconductors. For the isovalently-substituted material BaFe2(As1-xPx)2, these measurements reveal a strong coupling between external stress and both the Neel temperature and the superconducting critical temperature.