Superconducting coherence boosted by outer-layer metallic screening in multilayered cuprates

Abstract In multilayered high- T c cuprates, the inner CuO 2 planes (IPs) are spatially separated from dopant layers and thus remain cleaner than the outer planes (OPs). Here, we investigate five-layer (Cu,C)Ba 2 Ca 4 Cu 5 O y (Cu1245) and three-layer Ba 2 Ca 2 Cu 3 O 6 (F,O) 2 (F0223) using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and uncover an unprecedented situation, in which only the IPs become superconducting while the OPs remain metallic at low temperatures. Our model calculations indicate that over 95% of the OP wavefunction remains confined to OP itself, rendering superconducting proximity negligible. This interlayer decoupling realizes an ideal configuration—a single superconducting CuO 2 layer screened from the dopant layer-induced disorder by heavily overdoped metallic OPs. The clean CuO 2 layer exhibits a large superconducting gap with coherent Bogoliubov peaks extending beyond the antiferromagnetic zone boundary, and a widely extended coherent flat band at the Brillouin zone edge. These findings introduce the “degree of screening” as a physical parameter for probing competition between pseudogap and superconductivity, and for bridging typically disordered real materials with the idealized theoretical models.