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New high-Tc superconductors share magnetic properties with cuprates

There's been another development in the nascent field of iron-based high-temperature superconductors, which were recently shown to be able to turn superconducting at the very respectable temperature of 55 K.

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US have used neutron beams to investigate the magnetic properties of the iron-based materials. They found that, at low temperatures and when undoped, the materials make a transition into an antiferromagnetic state in which magnetic layers are interspersed with non-magnetic layers. But when the materials are doped with fluorine to make them into high-temperature superconductors, this magnetic ordering is suppressed.

This is reminiscent of the behaviour of cuprates — the highest temperature superconductors known to-date. Is this more than a coincidence? We'll have to wait and see.

The research is published online here in Nature.

Posted by Jon Cartwright on May 29, 2008 2:06 PM |

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Comments (1)

  • 1 Alastair Carnegie June 1, 2008 2:52 PM

    Circa 1983, I was invited by Cambridge University to chaperone newly arrived foreign exchange students, when I was a visitor at the Deptartment of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, D.A.M.T.P. Students from Russia were rather surprised that they could 'browse' any book they liked on the library shelves, back in Russia they were waited upon by Library Assistants. My grasp of the Russian language was minimal, and they needed to be set a project. I figured an experiment in statistical analysis would be a suitable start, so useing mainly sign language and demonstration, I proceeded to the Theoretical Physics section, pulled a book off the shelf, held the book by the spine, so that the pages tended to open at the most read or photocopied pages, and inserted slips of paper in those pages to mark them. The exchange students task was to analyse the statistical significance of the results.

    It came as no surprise to me that 'superconductivity' turned out to be the most popular section in most books on those shelves. We identified Lanthanum and Copper as the statistically most prominent, passing this information on to Goodfellow Materials for Researcg and Industry, then located in Cambridge Science Park.

    It was a moment to savour when the first news of high-Tc superconductors was published, and the copper oxide component quite a surprise, oxides were unexpected.

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