Paper detail

Quasi-particles ultrafastly releasing kink bosons to form Fermi arcs in a cuprate superconductor

In a conventional framework, superconductivity is lost at a critical temperature (T_c) because, at higher temperatures, gluing bosons can no longer bind two electrons into a Cooper pair. In high-T_c cuprates, it is still unknown how superconductivity vanishes at T_c. We provide evidence that the so-called <~70-meV kink bosons that dress the quasi-particle excitations are playing a key role in the loss of superconductivity in a cuprate. We irradiated a 170-fs laser pulse on Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δand monitored the responses of the superconducting gap and dressed quasi-particles by time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. We observe an ultrafast loss of superconducting gap near the d-wave node, or light-induced Fermi arcs, which is accompanied by spectral broadenings and weight redistributions occurring within the kink binding energy. We discuss that the underlying mechanism of the spectral broadening that induce the Fermi arc is the undressing of quasi-particles from the kink bosons. The loss mechanism is beyond the conventional framework, and can accept the unconventional phenomena such as the signatures of Cooper pairs remaining at temperatures above T_c.