Latest Cuprate Stories

To engineers, it’s a tale as old as time: Electrical current is carried through materials by flowing electrons. But physicists at the University of Illinois and the University of Pennsylvania found that for copper-containing superconductors, known as cuprates, electrons are not enough to carry the current. “The story of electrical conduction in metals is told entirely in terms of electrons.  The cuprates show that there is something completely new to be understood beyond what...

Discovery in parent of one high-temperature superconductor may lead to predictive controlA team of scientists studying the parent compound of a cuprate (copper-oxide) superconductor has discovered a link between two different states, or phases, of that matter - and written a mathematical theory to describe the relationship. This work, appearing in the July 22, 2011, issue of Science, will help scientists predict the material's behavior under varying conditions, and may help explain how it's...

Technique reveals quantum phase transition; could lead to superconducting transistors for power-saving electronicsLike atomic-level bricklayers, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory are using a precise atom-by-atom layering technique to fabricate an ultrathin transistor-like field effect device to study the conditions that turn insulating materials into high-temperature superconductors. The technical break-through, which is described in the...

Iowa State part of materials science collaboration highlighted during meetingAn Iowa State theoretical physicist will describe the latest ideas in high-temperature superconductivity during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Feb. 17-21 in Washington, D.C.Jörg Schmalian, an Iowa State professor of physics and astronomy and an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, will be part of a symposium addressing the 100-year history of...

HZB-Scientists discovered a unique feature of SuperconductivitySince their discovery in 2008, a new class of superconductors has precipitated a flood of research the world over. Unlike the previously familiar copper ceramics (cuprates), the basic structure of this new class consists of iron compounds. Because the structure of these compounds differs from the cuprates in many fundamental ways, there is hope of gaining new insights into how the phenomenon of superconductivity arises.In...

Superconducting materials, which transmit power resistance-free, are found to perform optimally when high- and low-charge density varies on the nanoscale level, according to research performed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.In research toward better understanding the dynamics behind high-temperature superconductivity, the ORNL scientists rewrote computational code for the numerical Hubbard model that previously assumed copper-compound superconducting materials...

In a major step toward understanding the mysterious "pseudogap" state in high-temperature cuprate superconductors, a team of Cornell, Binghamton University and Brookhaven National Laboratory scientists have found a "broken symmetry," where electrons act like molecules in a liquid crystal: Electrons between copper and oxygen atoms arrange themselves differently "north-south" than "east-west."This simple discovery opens a door to new research that could...

Canadian scientists are challenging physics' single-band Hubbard theory that's used to predict and calculate behavior of high-temperature superconductors. University of British Columbia researchers said their findings mark the first compelling evidence challenging the Hubbard model under certain conditions, and could necessitate entirely new theoretical approaches to explaining superconductivity in certain materials. Single-band Hubbard physics has been used for 20 years to predict how...

New UBC research has literally and figuratively poked holes in single-band Hubbard physics--a model that has been used to predict and calculate the behavior of high-temperature superconductors for 20 years.The findings are the first compelling evidence challenging the model under certain conditions, and could necessitate entirely new theoretical approaches to explaining superconductivity in cuprate materials, one of the outstanding mysteries in condensed-matter physics."Single-band...

Superconductivity appears to rely on very different mechanisms in two varieties of iron-based superconductors. The insight comes from research groups that are making bold statements about the correct description of superconductivity in iron-based compounds in two papers about to be published in journals of the American Physical Society.The 2008 discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in iron-based compounds has led to a flood of research in the past year. As the literature mounts on...