Conductivity and phase coherence length of single electrons in layered cuprates

¹ Department of Physics, Kent State University - Kent OH 44242, USA
² Materials Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory - Argonne, IL 60439, USA
³ Department of Physics and Institute for Pure and Applied Physical Sciences University of California - San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA

Received: 10 May 2001
Accepted: 22 October 2001

Abstract

We present a novel approach to the analysis of the normal-state in-plane and out-of-plane conductivities of anisotropic layered cuprates with incoherent out-of-plane transport such as () and (). We show that the resistive anisotropy of these crystals is a measure of the in-plane phase coherence length . This result has two important implications: i) One can obtain experimentally the dependence of conductivity on phase coherence length . This -dependence for different doping follows a universal scaling relationship. This universality of for different doping is a direct experimental confirmation of the scaling hypothesis. ii)  at a given temperature changes nonmonotonically with doping, reaching a maximum in the sample closest to the metal-insulator transition. We show that this result is a consequence of incoherent c-axis conduction.