Abstract
Relentless effort for three decades to uncover the mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity has passed. Progress has, to a large degree, been held back by the difficulty to probe the low-temperature normal state. This non-superconducting ground state is believed to hold the key to this longstanding enigma. Here, we reported x-ray diffraction experiments performed at SACLA free-electron laser under pulsed magnetic fields capable of reaching the normal state. For the primary purpose, our measurements were designed to search for field-induced charge ordering in prototypical cuprate material La2-xSrxCuO4 (x = 12 and 14.5 %). However, due to large background scattering, we were unable to successfully resolve the intensity from the charge order reflections. Instead, we observed a magnetostriction effect Δc/c as large as 10-5 which increases linearly proportional to H 2. This observation calls for further lab-based magnetostriction measurement as the c-axis lattice parameter may be an important tuning parameter for superconducting transition temperature Tc, via orbital distillation scenario.
