Cuprates, or compounds made of copper and oxygen, can conduct electricity without resistance by being "doped" with other chemical elements and cooled to temperatures below minus 210 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite extensive research on this phenomenon -- called high-temperature superconductivity -- scientists still aren't sure how it works. Previous experiments have established that ordered arrangements of electrical charges known as "charge stripes" coexist with superconductivity in many forms of cuprates. However, the exact nature of these stripes -- specifically, whether they fluctuate over time -- and their relationship to superconductivity -- whether they work together with or against the electrons that pair up and flow without energy loss -- have remained a mystery.
Now, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have demonstrated that static, as opposed to fluctuating, charge stripes coexist with superconductivity in a cuprate when lanthanum and barium are added in certain amounts. Their research, described in a paper published on October 11 in Physical Review Letters, suggests that this static ordering of electrical charges may cooperate rather than compete with superconductivity. If this is the case, then the electrons that periodically bunch together to form the static charge stripes may be separated in space from the free-moving electron pairs required for superconductivity.
"Understanding the detailed physics of how these compounds work helps us validate or rule out existing theories and should point the way toward a recipe for how to raise the superconducting temperature," said paper co-author Mark Dean, a physicist in the X-Ray Scattering Group of the Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science Department at Brookhaven Lab. "Raising this temperature is crucial for the application of superconductivity to lossless power transmission."
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