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High-temperature superconductors

Some vortices like it hot

Nature volume 406, pages 467–468 (2000)Cite this article

The discovery of high-temperature superconductivity, in a family of compounds containing copper–oxygen layers1, triggered intense research into these copper oxides. It has become increasingly clear that the high-temperature superconductors are not just conventional superconductors with a higher superconducting-transition temperature, Tc — the point at which electrons pair up and begin to flow without resistance — but are fundamentally different beasts. On page 486 of this issue, Xu et al.2 report that some aspects of superconductivity may reveal themselves at temperatures much higher than Tc. This work confirms how different the copper-oxide superconductors are, and how little we understand them at present.

Most significant among the differences is that, whereas conventional superconductors develop from the metallic state, the copper oxides start out life as insulators. Charge carriers are introduced into the insulator by the process of doping. For example, one starts with the insulator La2CuO4 and replaces some of the La3+ by Sr2+, yielding La2−xSrxCuO4. The result is that x electrons per copper atom are removed from the copper-oxide plane. When x is between 0.05 and 0.25, the material is superconducting, with the highest Tc around x=0.15. Moreover, La2CuO4 itself is an unusual insulator, called a Mott insulator. It is insulating by virtue of the strong repulsion between electrons occupying the same crystal lattice sites. So the problem with understanding high- Tc superconductivity is synonymous with the problem of understanding doping in a Mott insulator, a difficult issue in condensed-matter physics that has received a lot of attention only in the past decade.

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Figure 1: How to measure the Nernst effect due to vortices in superconductors.

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  1. Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 02139, Massachusetts, USA

    Patrick A. Lee

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Correspondence to Patrick A. Lee.

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Lee, P. Some vortices like it hot. Nature 406, 467–468 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35020173

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