Possible counterintuitive enhancement of superconductivity in ladder-type cuprates by longitudinal compression

We theoretically study the effect of uniaxial deformation of ladder-type cuprate superconductors. Model construction based on first principles calculation shows that the rung-to-leg ratio of the nearest neighbor hoppings counterintuitively increases when the lattice is compressed in the longitudinal (leg) direction. This leads to an enhancement of the superconducting transition temperature, which intuitively is expected when compressed in the rung direction. Such a trend is traced back to the on-site hybridization between Cu$4s$ and Cu$d_{x^2-y^2}$ orbitals, which varies and changes sign upon lattice deformation.