“Long-awaited explanation” for mysterious effects in
high-temperature superconductors
Physicists in Bochum and Paris report in “Nature Physics”
A German-French research team has constructed a new model
that explains how the so-called pseudogap state forms in high-temperature
superconductors. The calculations predict two coexisting electron orders. Below
a certain temperature, superconductors lose their electrical resistance and can
conduct electricity without loss. “It is not to be excluded that the new
pseudogap theory also provides the long-awaited explanation for why, in
contrast to conventional metallic superconductors, certain ceramic copper oxide
bonds lose their electrical resistance at such unusually high temperatures”,
say Prof. Dr. Konstantin Efetov and Dr. Hendrik Meier of the Chair of
Theoretical Solid State Physics at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. They obtained
the findings in close cooperation with Dr. Catherine Pépin from the Institute
for Theoretical Physics in Saclay near Paris. The team reports in the journal
“Nature Physics”.