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SUPERCONDUCTIVITY

Carriers that count

Nature Physics volume 16, pages 1171–1172 (2020)Cite this article

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An exactly solvable model for superconductivity includes two crucial features of the cuprates and sheds light on unexplained experiments.

The Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) theory of superconductivity1 was a landmark achievement of quantum many-body physics in the 1950s. For some time, the community thought that superconductivity was understood, but the subject was revived in the late 1980s with the discovery of a different form of superconductivity with high critical temperature in copper oxides. Since then, high-temperature superconductivity has earned the reputation of being the biggest conundrum of condensed matter physics2, in part because the non-superconducting state from which the superconductivity appears is very different from the BCS paradigm. Writing in Nature Physics, Philip Phillips and collaborators now take a conceptual step forward by finding an exactly-solvable model that captures important features of the normal state and can allow superconductivity3.

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Fig. 1: Phase diagram and superfluid density.

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  1. Instituut-Lorentz, Universiteit Leiden, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Jan Zaanen

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  1. Jan Zaanen
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Correspondence to Jan Zaanen.

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Zaanen, J. Carriers that count. Nat. Phys. 16, 1171–1172 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-020-0979-5

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