Journal of the American Chemical Society, Vol.135, No.8, 3158-3163, 2013
Effect of Doping on the Magnetostructural Ordered Phase of Iron Arsenides: A Comparative Study of the Resistivity Anisotropy in Doped BaFe2As2 with Doping into Three Different Sites
To unravel the role of doping in iron-based superconductors, we investigated the in-plane resistivity of BaFe2As2 doped at one of the three different lattice sites, Ba(Fe1-xCox)(2)As-2, BaFe2(As1-xPx)(2), and Ba1-xKxFe2As2, focusing on the doping effect in the low-temperature antiferromagnetic/orthorhombic (AFO) phase. A major role of doping in the high-temperature paramagnetic/tetragonal (PT) phase is known to change the Fermi surface by supplying charge carriers or exerting chemical pressure. In the AFO phase, we found a clear correlation between the magnitude of the residual resistivity and the resistivity anisotropy. This indicates that the resistivity anisotropy originates from anisotropic impurity scattering due to dopant atoms. The magnitude of the residual resistivity was also found to be a parameter controlling the suppression rate of the AFO ordering temperature. Therefore, the dominant role of doping in the AFO phase is to introduce disorder to the system, distinct from that in the PT phase.