Although high-temperature superconductors are widely used in technologies such as MRI machines, explaining the unusual properties of these materials remains an unsolved problem for theoretical physicists. Major progress in this important field has now been reported by physicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in a pair of papers published back-to-back in the July 29 issue of Physical Review Letters.
The first paper, by UCSC physicist Sriram Shastry, presents a new theory of "Extremely Correlated Fermi Liquids." The second paper compares calculations based on this theory to experimental data from studies of high-temperature superconductors using a technique called angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). The lead author of this second paper is Gey-Hong Gweon, assistant professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz, with coauthors Shastry and Genda Gu of Brookhaven National Laboratory.
"I showed my preliminary calculations to Gweon, who is an expert in this field, and he was very excited," said Shastry, a distinguished professor of physics at UCSC. "He obtained data from lots of experimental groups, including his own, and we found a remarkably successful agreement between theory and experiment at a level that has never been achieved before in this field."
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