Emergence of charge order from the vortex state of a high temperature superconductor

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Evidence is mounting that charge order competes with superconductivity in high Tc cuprates.

• Whether this has any relationship to the pairing mechanism is unknown since neither the universality of the competition nor its microscopic nature has been established.
• Here using nuclear magnetic resonance, we show that, similar to La214, charge order in YBCO has maximum strength inside the superconducting dome, at doping levels p = 0.11 - 0.12.We further show that the overlap of halos of incipient charge order around vortex cores, similar to those visualised in Bi2212, can explain the threshold magnetic field at which long-range charge order emerges.
• These results reveal universal features of a competition in which charge order and superconductivity appear as joint instabilities of the same normal state, whose relative balance can be field-tuned in the vortex state.