Anomalies of upper critical field in the spinel superconductor LiTi2O4−δ

© 2019 American Physical Society. High-field electrical transport and point-contact tunneling spectroscopy are used to investigate superconducting properties of spinel oxide LiTi2O4-δ films with various oxygen contents. It is striking that although the superconducting transition temperature and energy gap are almost unchanged, an isotropic upper critical field Bc2 up to 26.0 T is observed in the oxygen-rich sample, which is more than twice the Bc2 of 11.3 T in the anoxic one. The change of the dominating pair-breaking mechanism from the orbital effect to the spin flip at Bc2 is achieved by tuning oxygen contents, which can be explained by the appearance of small Fermi pockets due to extra oxygen. Our paper provides deep understanding of the intrinsic relation between Bc2 and the complex Fermi surface, and contributes a promising way to enhance Bc2 for practical superconductors.