The various ground states in cuprate superconductors are finely balanced, with only a small energy differences separating them. It was recently found that using uniaxial pressure the balance can be tilted away from stripe order and towards superconductivity in the archetypical cuprate Ba-doped La2CuO4. We used our new uniaxial pressure device on a hard X-ray beamline at DESY to uncover how the different quantum phases are controlled by modifying the underlying crystal structure between orthorhombic and tetragonal phases. Find out more in our preprint:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.07015