Uladzislau Mikhailau, Luke C. Rhodes, Siri A. Berge, Matthias Hepting, Masahiko, Isobe, Carolina de Almeida Marques, Pascal Puphal, and Peter Wahl

Cuprate and nickelates exhibit stripe-ordered ground states seemingly driven by strong electronic correlation effects.[1,2] The general characteristic of this state is the presence of antiphase antiferromagnetic domains separated by quasi-1D channels of delocalized carriers. Such stripe order can be explained in a doped Hubbard model.

I will show imaging of locally commensurate stripe order in the recently discovered nickelate superconductor La4Ni3O10 [3] using low temperature Scanning Tunneling Microscopy. From detailed atomic scale investigation of the magnetic and charge order at ambient pressure, our findings are consistent with the realization of an electron-doped stripe order. We demonstrate key features of correlation-driven stripe orders, conflicting with parent spin-density wave picture.

We find that charge carriers injected from the tip into the sample can trigger stripe dynamics. The dynamics exhibits a characteristic threshold energy and provides additional evidence for correlation-driven stripe order.

Our study shows commonalities across cuprate and nickelate high-temperature superconducting systems through a shared instability toward stripe order.

[1] J. M. Tranquada et al. Phys. Rev. Let., 78(2):338–341 (1997)

[2] J. M. Tranquada et al. Phys. Rev. B, 52(5):3581–3595 (1995)

[3] Zhu, Y. et al. Nature 631, 531–536 (2024)