Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
For the first time, the nature of the carriers in strongly underdoped cuprates has been mapped with spin polarized scanning tunneling spectroscopy by a group in Nanjing, revealing that these form mysterious collective entities living on plaquettes of size 4 lattice constants with intriguing internal structure.