Excess conductivity of overdoped Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+x crystals well above Tc -: art. no. 144508

We have used a multiterminal technique in order to measure the (a,b) plane excess conductivity Delta sigma in several Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+x single crystals. We find that the experimental Delta sigma does not follow a simple power law Delta sigma similar to epsilon (-alpha), with epsilon =ln(T/T-c), and that it drops faster than the two-dimensional Aslamazov-Larkin law, alpha = 1, with increasing temperature. In addition, data for samples with different doping do not scale on a universal curve. We discuss our data in terms of microscopic and Ginzburg-Landau theories, where high-momentum fluctuations are either not excited, or phenomenologically cut off. The experimental Delta sigma drops even faster than the prediction of the extended microscopic theory. However, we can accurately describe all our data up to T approximate to1.3 T-c with the GL theory, assuming a sample-dependent cutoff value. We relate the cutoff parameter to the doping level of our samples.