Small Fermi Surface Pockets in Underdoped High Temperature Superconductors: Observation of Shubnikov–de Haas Oscillations in<mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><mml:msub><mml:mi>YBa</mml:mi><mml:mn>2</mml:mn></mml:msub><mml:msub><mml:mi>Cu</mml:mi><mml:mn>4</mml:mn></mml:msub><mml:msub><mml:mi mathvariant="normal">O</mml:mi><mml:mn>8</mml:mn></mml:msub></mml:math>

We report the observation of Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations in the underdoped cuprate superconductor YBa2Cu4O8 (Y124). For fields aligned along the c axis, the frequency of the oscillations is 660+/-30 T, which corresponds to approximately 2.4% of the total area of the first Brillouin zone. The effective mass of the quasiparticles on this orbit is measured to be 2.7+/-0.3 times the free electron mass. Both the frequency and mass are comparable to those recently observed for ortho-II YBa2Cu3O6.5 (Y123-II). We show that although small Fermi surface pockets may be expected from band-structure calculations in Y123-II, no such pockets are predicted for Y124. Our results therefore imply that these small pockets are a generic feature of the copper oxide plane in underdoped cuprates.