Enhancing Superconductivity of the Nonmagnetic Quasiskutterudites by Atomic Disorder.

We investigated the effect of enhancement of superconducting transition temperature Tc by nonmagnetic atom disorder in the series of filled skutterudite-related compounds (La3M4Sn13, Ca3Rh4Sn13, Y5Rh6Sn18, Lu5Rh6Sn18; M= Co, Ru, Rh), where the atomic disorder is generated by various defects or doping. We have shown that the disorder on the coherence length scale ξ in these nonmagnetic quasiskutterudite superconductors additionally generates a non-homogeneous, high-temperature superconducting phase with Tc⋆>Tc (dilute disorder scenario), while the strong fluctuations of stoichiometry due to increasing doping can rapidly increase the superconducting transition temperature of the sample even to the value of Tc⋆∼2Tc (dense disorder leading to strong inhomogeneity). This phenomenon seems to be characteristic of high-temperature superconductors and superconducting heavy fermions, and recently have received renewed attention. We experimentally documented the stronger lattice stiffening of the inhomogeneous superconducting phase Tc⋆ in respect to the bulk Tc one and proposed a model that explains the Tc⋆>Tc behavior in the series of nonmagnetic skutterudite-related compounds.