Heat transport in the cuprate superconductors YBa2Cu3Oy and La2−xSrxCuO4 was measured at low temperatures as a function of doping. A residual linear term κ0/T is observed throughout the superconducting region and it decreases steadily as the Mott insulator is approached from the overdoped regime. The low-energy quasiparticle gap extracted from κ0/T is seen to scale closely with the pseudogap. The ubiquitous presence of nodes and the tracking of the pseudogap shows that the overall gap remains of the pure d-wave form throughout the phase diagram, which excludes the possibility of a complex component (ix) appearing at a putative quantum phase transition and argues against a non-superconducting origin to the pseudogap. A comparison with superfluid density measurements reveals that the quasiparticle effective charge is weakly dependent on doping and close to unity.

The thermal conductivity of YBa2Cu3O6.9 was measured at low temperatures in untwinned single crystals with concentrations of Zn impurities from 0 to 3% of Cu. A linear term κ0/T = 0.19 mW K −2 cm −1 is clearly resolved as T → 0, and found to be virtually independent of Zn concentration. The existence of this residual normal fluid strongly validates the basic theory of transport in unconventional superconductors. Moreover, the observed universal behavior is in quantitative agreement with calculations for a gap function of d-wave symmetry.

A residual linear term is observed in the thermal conductivity of optimally-doped Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8 at very low temperatures whose magnitude is in excellent agreement with the value expected from Fermi-liquid theory and the d-wave energy spectrum measured by photoemission spectroscopy, with no adjustable parameters. This solid basis allows us to make a quantitative analysis of thermodynamic properties at low temperature and establish that thermally-excited quasiparticles are a significant, perhaps even the dominant mechanism in suppressing the superfluid density in cuprate superconductors Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8 and YBa2Cu3O7.

The Wiedemann-Franz (WF) ratio compares the thermal and electrical conductivities in a metal. We describe a new way to determine its value, based on the thermal Hall conductivity. The technique is applied to copper and to untwinned YBaCuO. In the latter, we uncover a T-linear dependence and suppression of the Hall-channel WF ratio. We discuss the implications of this suppression. The general suppression of the WF ratio in systems with predominant electron-electron scattering is discussed.

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