Magnetism and superconductivity in new FeAs based intermetallic compounds

Iron arsenide based superconductors were discovered in 2008, first in the oxide form in LaFeAs-O1-xFx, which had Tc = 26 K; and a few months later in the intermetallic form, in an oxygen-free compound, Ba1-xKxFe2As2, with a critical temperature of ~ 41 K. They are supposedly the second class of unconventional high temperature superconductors since the discover of Cu-based oxides almost 30 years ago. For being considered similar to the cuprates, and having Tcs as high as 55 K and critical currents of the order of those conventional superconductors used in commercial magnets, these materials have great potential to be used in transmission lines and high field magnetsm, specially in the intermetallic from, since they tend to be, presumably, more flexible and easier to manipulate and stabilize than an oxide ceramic. Furthermore, there is great interest in studying the microscopic nature and the origin of superconductivity in these materials and its relation with magnetism. As of today, single crystals of this family are synthesized mainly with the self-flux technique, which uses excess iron and arsenic in the growth. Yet, this excess of reagents needed to grow these impurity-free crystals can lead to an outbalance of the material's stoichiometry, and that can strongly alter the outcome of experiments which probe microscopic properties such as the symmetry of the superconductor state. Also, the excess of As in the growth is an extra danger for the grower. As such, search for alternative methods of synthesis of these materials is highly desirable. In this work, it's presented the synthesis method and characterization of the BaFe2-xCoxAs2 series grown from In flux. The macroscopic physcial properties such as DC resistivitity (p), DC magnetic susceptibility (x), specific heat at constant pressure (Cp) and X-ray powder diffraction were measured on the In-flux prepared single crystals. From our results, We extracted the magnetic and superconducting transition temperatures which allow us the construction of a temperature composition phase diagram for this series. The obtained phase diagram is in agreement with the diagram constructed using samples grown by the self-flux method, attesting the success of our systematic growth using the In flux without any effect in the macroscopic properties of the crystals. Furthermore, preliminary NMR experiments suggest that the In-grown crystals may be of higher quality than the self-flux grown single crystals (AU)