Abstract
Since the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in cop-per oxide compounds1, there has been much effort to understand what is required for a compound to have a high transition tem-perature (Tc). Up to now, all of the families of high-Tc copper oxide superconductors have contained two-dimensional sheets of Cu–O pyramids or octahedra, and the carriers of the superconduct-ing current have been electron vacancies, or 'holes'. By contrast, we report here the discovery of a family of superconducting copper oxides in which the carriers are electrons. The new superconductors are Ce4+-doped compounds, with the formula Ln2–xCexCuO4–y, where Ln stands for the lanthanides Pr, Nd or Sm. The compounds have the Nd2CuO4 (T′-phase) structure2, which is composed of sheets of Cu–O squares (see Fig. la). This structure has no apical oxygen atoms, in contrast to the T-phase structure with Cu–O octahedra (Fig. 1b), as observed in La2–xSrxCuO4 (refs 1, 2), and the T*-phase structure with Cu–O pyramids (Fig. 1c), as in Nd2–x–z Cex Srz CuO4 (ref. 3 and Y. T. et al., manuscript in preparation).
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References
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Tokura, Y., Takagi, H. & Uchida, S. A superconducting copper oxide compound with electrons as the charge carriers. Nature 337, 345–347 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1038/337345a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/337345a0
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