The symmetry of charge order in cuprates

Understand

Charge-ordered ground states permeate the phenomenology of 3d-based transition metal oxides, and more generally represent a distinctive hallmark of strongly-correlated states of matter.

• The recent discovery of charge order in various cuprate families fueled new interest into the role played by this incipient broken symmetry within the complex phase diagram of high-Tc superconductors.
• Here we use resonant X-ray scattering to resolve the main characteristics of the charge-modulated state in two cuprate families: Bi2201 and YBCO.
• We detect no signatures of spatial modulations along the nodal direction in Bi2201, thus clarifying the inter-unit-cell momentum-structure of charge order.