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High–temperature superconductivity

The great quantum conundrum

Nature volume 476, pages 37–39 (2011)Cite this article

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Twenty-five years on from its discovery, high-temperature superconductivity remains without a satisfactory explanation. The latest studies on the electronic phase diagram of copper oxide compounds reveal why this is so. See Letter p.73

Some years ago, I lectured at a National Science Foundation summer workshop for high-school physics teachers. My subject was superconductivity. One of my co-instructors was Robert Laughlin. Scrawled across the top of Bob's first projector slide was the phrase, 'The Theory of Everything', and I thought, “Oh, boy, here we go, the standard model of particle physics — again”. But underneath the title, he had written instead the many-body Schrödinger equation, summed over all the interactions between electrons and nuclei, and thus containing, once electron spin is included, the complete chemistry and physics of ordinary, terrestrial matter.

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Figure 1: Generic electronic phase diagram of the copper oxide superconductors.

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  1. Paul Michael Grant is at W2AGZ Technologies and is an emeritus research staff member at the IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California 95120, USA.,

    Paul Michael Grant

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Correspondence to Paul Michael Grant.

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Grant, P. The great quantum conundrum. Nature 476, 37–39 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/476037a

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