One of the greatest mysteries of experimental physics is how high-temperature superconducting materials work. High-temperature superconductors can carry electrical current with no resistance, which allows them to be used in highly efficient power cables, medical MRIs and particle accelerators.
Cracking the mystery of how these materials work could lead to superconducting devices that operate at room temperatures. In a new paper in Nature Physics, Moore Foundation grantees with the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech have at last solved one piece of this enduring puzzle.
They have confirmed that a transitional phase of matter called the pseudogap — one that occurs before these materials are cooled down to become superconducting — represents a distinct state of matter, with properties very different from those of the superconducting state itself.
When matter transitions from one state, or phase, to another — say, water freezing into ice — there is a change in the ordering pattern of the materials' particles. Physicists previously had detected hints of some type of ordering of electrons inside the pseudogap state. But exactly how they were ordering — and whether that ordering constituted a new state of matter — was unclear until now.
"We have discovered that in the pseudogap state, electrons form a highly unusual pattern that breaks nearly all of the symmetries of space. This provides a very compelling clue to the actual origin of the pseudogap state and could lead to a new understanding of how high-temperature superconductors work," says David Hsieh, Caltech physics professor and senior author of this new research.
Read the full article
here.
Message sent
Thank you for sharing.