Landau damping in high-temperature superconductors

We investigate the decay of a phonon into single-electron excitations in the cuprate superconductors. In a clean crystal the screening of the longitudinal phonon field cancels singularity of the Landau damping threshold and makes it experimentally unobservable. In a dirty metal the phase volume of the electrons involved in damping is small, which reduces the probability of the phonon decay. However, in this case the observation of dependence between the phonon linewidth and light penetration depth is more favorable than in the clean metal because the damping has no threshold.