Piezo- and electrooptics phenomena in high temperature superconducting films

Abstract Optically-induced linear electrooptics and elastooptics effects were discovered in high temperature superconducting Hg 0.85 Pb 0.18 Ba 0.13 CuO 4+ δ (Hg-1201) ( T c =112 K) single crystalline films deposited on the LiNbO 3 surface. Investigations were done by picosecond fast-resolved set-up. The set-up allowed to perform simultaneous measurements of birefirngence in regime of external fields with precision up to the 10 −7 . It was shown that below the superconducting critical temperature both piezooptic and linear electrooptics coefficients are substantially changed and show tremendous sensitivity to the appearance of superconductivity.