Incommensurate Phonon Anomaly and the Nature of Charge Density Waves in Cuprates

While charge density wave (CDW) instabilities are ubiquitous to superconducting cuprates, the different ordering wave vectors in various cuprate families have hampered a unified description of the CDW formation mechanism. Here, we investigate the temperature dependence of the low-energy phonons in the canonical CDW-ordered cuprate La1.875Ba0.125CuO4. We discover that the phonon softening wave vector associated with CDW correlations becomes temperature dependent in the high-temperature precursor phase and changes from a wave vector of 0.238 reciprocal lattice units (r.l.u.) below the ordering transition temperature to 0.3 r.l.u. at 300 K. This high-temperature behavior shows that 214-type cuprates can host CDW correlations at a similar wave vector to previously reported CDW correlations in non-214-type cuprates such as YBa2Cu3O6+delta. This indicates that cuprate CDWs may arise from the same underlying instability despite their apparently different low-temperature ordering wave vectors.