High-temperature superconductor spills secret: A new phase of matter

PhysOrg ^ | March 24, 2011 | Unknown

[decimon]

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley have joined with researchers at Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to mount a three-pronged attack on one of the most obstinate puzzles in materials sciences: what is the pseudogap?

A collaboration organized by Zhi-Xun Shen, a member of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science (SIMES) at SLAC and a professor of physics at Stanford University, used three complementary experimental approaches to investigate a single material, the high-temperature superconductor Pb-Bi2201 (lead bismuth strontium lanthanum copper-oxide). Their results are the strongest evidence yet that the pseudogap phase, a mysterious electronic state peculiar to high-temperature superconductors, is not a gradual transition to superconductivity in these materials, as many have long believed. It is in fact a distinct phase of matter.

"This is a paradigm shift in the way we understand high-temperature superconductivity," says Ruihua He, lead author with Makoto Hashimoto of the paper in the March 25 issue of the journal Science that describes the team's findings. "The involvement of an additional phase, once fully understood, might open up new possibilities for achieving superconductivity at even higher temperatures in these materials." When the research was done Hashimoto and He were members of SIMES, of Stanford's Department of Applied Physics, and of Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS), where He is now a postdoctoral fellow.

[RandallFlagg]

Yeah. What he said.

All I want to know is how soon we’ll have lightsabers.

[kitchen]

How long before I have to replace my mono-crystal copper stereo interconnects?

[ronnie raygun]

If anyone is a fringe fan, this is getting close

[SunkenCiv]

Jahn-Teller keyword topics from the FRchives:

• Scientists have discovered a new state of matter, called 'Jahn-Teller metals'
• This Strange Metal Might Be the Newest State of Matter
• The 2011 Cold Fusion/Lattice-Assisted Nuclear Reactions Colloquium at MIT -- Part 2
• MIT and Cold Fusion: A Special Report
• Ultrathin Copper-Oxide Layers Behave Like Quantum Spin Liquid
• One-atom-thick materials promise a 'new industrial revolution'