The superconductivity of Sr2RuO4 under c-axis uniaxial stress

Funding: F.J., A.P.M., and C.W.H. acknowledge the financial support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) - TRR 288 - 422213477 (project A10). H.S.R. and S.H.S. acknowledge the financial support of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK). H.S.R. acknowledges support from the Aker Scholarship. T.S. acknowledges the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), in particular the Discovery Grant [RGPIN-2020-05842], the Accelerator Supplement [RGPAS-2020-00060], and the Discovery Launch Supplement [DGECR-2020-00222]. N.K. is supported by a KAKENHI Grants-in-Aids for Scientific Research (Grant Nos.17H06136, 18K04715, and 21H01033), and Core-to-Core Program (No. JPJSCCA20170002) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and by a JST-Mirai Program (Grant No. JPMJMI18A3). Applying in-plane uniaxial pressure to strongly correlated low-dimensional systems has been shown to tune the electronic structure dramatically. For example, the unconventional superconductor Sr2RuO4 can be tuned through a single Van Hove point, resulting in strong enhancement of both Tc and Hc2. Out-of-plane (c axis) uniaxial pressure is expected to tune the quasi-two-dimensional structure even more strongly, by pushing it towards two Van Hove points simultaneously. Here, we achieve a record uniaxial stress of 3.2 GPa along the c axis of Sr2RuO4. Hc2 increases, as expected for increasing density of states, but unexpectedly Tc falls. As a first attempt to explain this result, we present three-dimensional calculations in the weak interaction limit. We find that within the weak-coupling framework there is no single order parameter that can account for the contrasting effects of in-plane versus c-axis uniaxial stress, which makes this new result a strong constraint on theories of the superconductivity of Sr2RuO4. Publisher PDF