Effects of strong magnetic fields on pairing fluctuations in high-temperature superconductors

Abstract

We present the theory for the effects of superconducting pairing fluctuations on the nuclear spin-lattice relaxation rate 1/T1 and the NMR Knight shift for layered superconductors in high magnetic fields. These results can be used to clarify the origin of the pseudogap in high-Tc cuprates, which has been attributed to spin fluctuations as well as pairing fluctuations. We present theoretical results for s-wave and d-wave pairing fluctuations and show that recent experiments in optimally doped YBa2Cu3O7-δ are described by d-wave pairing fluctuations [V. F. Mitrovic et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 2784 (1999); H. N. Bachman et al. (unpublished)]. In addition, we show that the orthorhombic distortion in YBa2Cu3O7-δ accounts for an experimentally observed discrepancy between 1/T1 obtained by nuclear quadrupole resonance and nuclear magnetic resonance at low field. We propose an NMR experiment to distinguish a fluctuating s-wave order parameter from a fluctuating strongly anisotropic order parameter, which may be applied to the system Nd2-xCexCuO4-δ and possibly other layered superconductors. [S0163-1829(99)02818-0].