Abstract
The thermal conductivity of a detwinned single crystal has been studied as a function of the relative orientation of the crystal axes and a magnetic field rotating in the Cu-O planes. Measurements were carried out at several different temperatures below for a field of 30 kOe. A fourfold symmetry characteristic of a superconducting gap with nodes at odd multiples of 45° in space was resolved. Experiments were performed to exclude a possible macroscopic origin for such a fourfold symmetry and our results impose an upper limit of 10% on the weight of the -wave component of the essentially -wave superconducting order parameter of YBCO.
- Received 8 November 1996
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.78.2624
©1997 American Physical Society