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Manifesto for a higher Tc

Nature Physics volume 7, pages 272–276 (2011)Cite this article

The term 'high-temperature superconductor' used to refer only to copper-based compounds — now, iron-based pnictides have entered the frame. The comparison of these two types of superconductor is revealing, and suggestive of what might be needed to achieve even higher transition temperatures.

The 2008 discovery of superconductivity in Fe-based pnictides (compounds of the elements from Group V: N, P, As, Sb, Bi) with transition temperatures Tc reaching almost 60 K was, arguably, among the most significant breakthroughs in condensed-matter physics during the past decade1. The excitement was enormous and so were the efforts — the amount of data obtained for Fe-pnictides over the previous three years is comparable to that collected for other known superconductors over several decades2,3,4. A number of new superconducting materials have been discovered not only within the Fe-pnictide family but also in the Fe-chalcogenides group: Fe-based compounds with elements such as S, Se and Te. Before 2008, the term 'high-temperature superconductivity' (HTS) was reserved for Cu-based superconductors (CuSC or cuprates). The transformation from the 'copper age' to the 'iron age' was swift and the term HTS now equally applies to both CuSC and Fe-based superconductors (FeSC).

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Figure 1: Schematic phase diagrams of the cuprates and pnictides on hole- or electron-doping2,3,4.
Figure 2: Characteristic energy scales for fermionic and bosonic excitations, electronic kinetic energy Kexp, superfluid density and superconducting energy gap in cuprates (red boxes) and Fe-based materials (blue boxes).
Figure 3: Schematics of two-dimensional cross-sections of Fermi surfaces (FSs) for cuprates and pnictides.
Figure 4: Superfluid density in exotic superconductors.

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Acknowledgements

A.V.C. is supported by the NSF. D.N.B. is supported by the NSF, AFOSR and DOE.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. D. N Basov is in the Department of Physics, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093-0319, USA,

    D. N. Basov

  2. Andrey V. Chubukov is in the Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin, 1150 University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA.,

    Andrey V. Chubukov

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Correspondence to D. N. Basov or Andrey V. Chubukov.

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Basov, D., Chubukov, A. Manifesto for a higher Tc. Nature Phys 7, 272–276 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1975

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