| dc.description.abstract | The discovery of high-\(T_c\) superconductivity in 1986 generated tremendous excitement. However, despite over 25 years of intense research efforts, many properties of these complex materials are still poorly understood. For example, the cuprate phase diagram is dominated by a mysterious "pseudogap" state, a depletion in the Fermi level density of states which persists above the superconducting critical temperature \(T_c\). Furthermore, these materials are typically electronically inhomogeneous at the atomic scale, but to what extent the intrinsic chemical or structural disorder is responsible for electronic inhomogeneity, and whether the inhomogeneity is relevant to pseudogap or superconductivity, are unresolved questions. In this thesis, I will describe scanning tunneling microscopy experiments which probe the interplay of structural, chemical and electronic disorder in high-\(T_c\) superconductors. First, I will present the imaging of a picoscale orthorhombic structural distortion in Bi-based cuprates. Based on insensitivity of this structural distortion to temperature, magnetic field, and doping level we conclude that it is an omnipresent background not related to the pseudogap state. I will also present the discovery of three types of oxygen disorder in the high-\(T_c\) superconductor \(Bi_2Sr_2CaCu_2O_{8+x}\) two different interstitials as well as vacancies at the apical oxygen site. We find a strong correlation between the positions of these defects and the nanoscale inhomogeneity in the pseudogap phase, which highlights the importance of chemical disorder in these compounds. Furthermore, I will show the determination of the exact intra-unit-cell positions of these dopants and the effect of different types of intrinsic strain on their placement. I will also describe the identification of chemical disorder in another cuprate \(Y_{1−x}Ca_xBa_2Cu_3O_{7−x}\), and the first observation of electronic inhomogeneity of the spectral gap in this material. Finally, I will present definitive identification of the cleavage surfaces in \(Pr_xCa_{1−x}Fe_2As_2\), and imaging of Pr dopants which exhibit lack of clustering, thus ruling out Pr inhomogeneity as the likely source of the high-\(T_c\) volume fraction. To achieve the aforementioned results, we employ novel analytical and experimental tools such as an average supercell algorithm, high-bias dI/dV dopant mapping, and local barrier height mapping. | en_US |
