Even a decade and a half after the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in ceramic compounds containing copper-oxide planes, these materials continue to puzzle condensed-matter theorists. T...
Read article: Explaining high-Tc superconductors
There is an old joke about a farmer who has a hen that will not lay eggs. After consulting unsuccessfully with a biologist, and then a chemist, he finally turns to a theoretical physicist. Several day...
Read article: Superconductor stripes move on
Superconductivity happens when the charge carriers overcome their mutual repulsion and bind together into Cooper pairs. In low-temperature superconductors phonons – quantized vibrations of the c...
In copper oxide each of the copper atoms is expected to bond with two oxygen atoms. According to some theories however, the copper atoms can covalently bond with each other. Such bonds – in whic...
Photons are traditionally detected by converting their energy into an electric signal, which destroys the photon in the process. An additional problem in quantum measurements is that if one variable &...
Quasicrystals are materials that do not have a periodic lattice structure but still display subtle long-range order, such as “five-fold” symmetry, that is not possible in regular crystals....
However,it is the last paragraph that makes the paper unique: “The tragedy of beautiful theories, ” write Chakraverty et al., “is that they are often destroyed by ugly facts. One per...
Their technique works by growing single crystal films of the superconducting compound lanthanum-strontium-copper-oxide (La1.9Sr0.1CuO4) on top of a crystal with a smaller lattice spacing. Because the ...
The Cambridge team studied two heavy fermion compounds: CeIn3 and CePd2Si2. Heavy fermion compounds are materials in which the conduction electrons acquire masses hundreds of times those of free elect...
The barriers found on fault lines are usually regions in which a strong pinning force reduces the movement of the plates. However geologists cannot define the position of these barriers around the fau...
