Editor's Summary
28 August 2008
Superconductivity: altered states
One of the enduring mysteries of the high-temperature copper oxide superconductors is the existence of a 'pseudogap' — that is, an energy gap resembling the one characterizing the superconducting state but which also appears in the non-superconducting state. Kohsaka et al. have looked in detail at the electronic excitations underlying the superconducting and pseudogap states, and find two very different types of behaviour: states in momentum space that correspond to the expected delocalised electron pairs responsible for superconductivity, and some unusual states localized in real space that correspond to the pseudogap. The relationship between these two excitation types provides a new perspective on the still enigmatic relationship between the pseudogap and superconductivity, and strengthens the conceptual connection with the properties of the insulating parent compounds, where electron localization in real space is central to their behaviour.
News and Views: Condensed-matter physics: Dual realities in superconductors
In some copper oxides, superconductivity emerges when fixed electrons become mobile. A microscopy technique reveals that this process is associated with the transfer of electrons between real and abstract spaces.
Tetsuo Hanaguri
doi:10.1038/4541062a
Article: How Cooper pairs vanish approaching the Mott insulator in Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+
Y. Kohsaka, C. Taylor, P. Wahl, A. Schmidt, Jhinhwan Lee, K. Fujita, J. W. Alldredge, K. McElroy, Jinho Lee, H. Eisaki, S. Uchida, D.-H. Lee & J. C. Davis
doi:10.1038/nature07243
Abstract | Full Text | PDF (1,242K) | Supplementary information
