Structural phase transitions and superconductivity in lanthanum copper oxides

Despite the enormous effort expended over the past ten years to determine the mechanism underlying high temperature superconductivity in cuprates there is still no consensus on the physical origin of this fascinating phenomenon. This is a consequence of a number of factors, among which are the intrinsic difficulties in understanding the strong electron correlations in the copper oxides, determining the roles played by antiferromagnetic interactions and low dimensionality, analyzing the complex phonon dispersion relationships, and characterizing the phase diagrams which are functions of the physical parameters of temperature and pressure, as well as the chemical parameters of stoichiometry and hole concentration. In addition to all of these intrinsic difficulties, extrinsic materials issues such as sample quality and homogeneity present additional complications. Within the field of high temperature superconductivity there exists a subfield centered around the material originally reported to exhibit high temperature superconductivity by Bednorz and Mueller, Ba doped La{sub 2}CuO{sub 4}. This is structurally the simplest cuprate superconductor. The authors report on studies of phase differences observed between such base superconductors doped with Ba or Sr. What these studies have revealed is a fascinating interplay of structural, magnetic and superconducting properties which is unique in the field of high temperature superconductivity and is summarized in this paper