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High-temperature superconductivity

Ineluctable complexity

Nature Physics volume 8, pages 864–866 (2012)Cite this article

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The discovery of charge-density-wave order in the high-temperature superconductor YBa2Cu3O6+y places charge order centre stage with superconductivity, suggesting that they are intertwined rather than competing.

In physics, 'understanding' involves simplifying a problem as much as possible, but not so much that its essence is lost. Since high-temperature superconductivity (HTSC) was discovered in 19861, it has been widely accepted that the heart of the problem is the interrelation between the (d wave) superconducting state, the proximate 'Mott insulating' phase that has long-range antiferromagnetic order and the mysterious 'bad metal' phase that dominates the phase diagram at temperatures well above the superconducting transition temperature, Tc. Persistent evidence of other forms of electronic order, including charge- and spin-density-wave orders and nematic charge order, has (mostly) been dismissed as being an uninteresting sideshow, a material-dependent complication or even a disease. However, in recent years increasingly extensive but largely indirect experimental evidence that these other types of order are ubiquitous in HTSC materials has led to a slowly spreading realization that they may have to be included in the 'irreducible minimum' to understand HTSC. The direct observation — by X-ray diffraction — of an incipient charge density wave (CDW) in high-quality (ortho-VIII) crystals of YBa2Cu3O6+y (YBCO) has now been independently reported by Johan Chang et al.2 in Nature Physics and Giacomo Ghiringhelli et al.3 in Science. This is an important discovery, with the broad implication that other forms of charge order are inextricably intertwined with HTSC.

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Figure 1: Schematic phase diagram of the high-temperature superconductor YBCO.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Eduardo Fradkin is in the Department of Physics, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801-3080, USA,

    Eduardo Fradkin

  2. Steven A. Kivelson is in the Department of Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-4045, USA,

    Steven A. Kivelson

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  1. Eduardo Fradkin
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  2. Steven A. Kivelson
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Correspondence to Eduardo Fradkin or Steven A. Kivelson.

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Fradkin, E., Kivelson, S. Ineluctable complexity. Nature Phys 8, 864–866 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2498

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