Years of experiments on various types of high-temperature (high-Tc) superconductors—materials that offer hope for energy-saving applications such as zero-loss electrical power lines—have turned up an amazing array of complex behaviors among the electrons that in some instances pair up to carry current with no resistance, and in others stop the flow of current in its tracks. The variety of these exotic electronic phenomena is a key reason it has been so hard to identify unifying concepts to explain why high-Tc superconductivity occurs in these promising materials.
Now Séamus Davis, a physicist who's conducted experiments on many of these materials at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Cornell University, and Dung-Hai Lee, a theorist at DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, postulate a set of key principles for understanding the superconductivity and the variety of "intertwined" electronic phenomena that applies to all the families of high-Tc superconductors. They describe these general concepts in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences October 10, 2013.
"If we are right, this is kind of the 'light at the end of the tunnel' point," said Davis. "After decades of wondering which are the key things we need to understand high-Tc superconductivity and which are the peripheral things, we think we have identified what the essential elements are."
Said Lee, "The next step is to be able to predict which other materials will have these essential elements that will drive high Tc superconductivity—and that ability is still under development."
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