Puddle formation and persistent gaps across the non-mean-field breakdown of superconductivity in overdoped (Pb,Bi)(2)Sr(2)CuO(6+δ)

The cuprate high-temperature superconductors exhibit many unexplained electronic phases, but the superconductivity at high doping is often believed to be governed by conventional mean-field Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer theory(1). However, it was shown that the superfluid density vanishes when the transition temperature goes to zero(2,3), in contradiction to expectations from Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer theory. Our scanning tunnelling spectroscopy measurements in the overdoped regime of the (Pb,Bi)(2)Sr(2)CuO(6+δ) high-temperature superconductor show that this is due to the emergence of nanoscale superconducting puddles in a metallic matrix(4,5). Our measurements further reveal that this puddling is driven by gap filling instead of gap closing. The important implication is that it is not a diminishing pairing interaction that causes the breakdown of superconductivity. Unexpectedly, the measured gap-to-filling correlation also reveals that pair breaking by disorder does not play a dominant role and that the mechanism of superconductivity in overdoped cuprate superconductors is qualitatively different from conventional mean-field theory.