On the Nature of the Superconducting Transition in YBCO

In the high-Tc superconductor YBCO, a transition was observed from a hexagonal FLL at low magnetic field (parallel to the c-axis) to a square configuration at high fields. Also seen was a rapid decrease in the Bragg intensity at low temperature (T). It has been the general belief that both the symmetry change and the T-dependence behaviour was due to the d- wave nature of high-Tc superconductivity. However, we observed that the fall-off in intensity with increasing temperature depended on the strength of the applied external field and that excellent fits to this T-dependence could be obtained by simply multiplying the temperature dependence of the familiar Ginzburg-Landau two-fluid model, appropriate for high-kappa materials conventional superconductors, by an exponential factor exp(-aT), with the field-dependent variable `a' being the only free parameter. The impact of these observations on the symmetry of the order parameter will be discussed.