Study raises new possibilities for triggering room-temperature superconductivity with light

Phys.org  March 9, 2022 In the case of the superconducting material yttrium barium copper oxide, or YBCO, experiments have shown that under certain conditions, knocking it out of equilibrium with a laser pulse allows it to superconduct at much closer to room temperature than researchers expected. YBCO switches from a normal to a superconducting state when chilled below a certain transition temperature or it can be switched off with a pulse of light. An international team of researchers (South Korea, USA – SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Japan, Germany) compared the two switching approaches (exposing to high magnetic field and laser […]

Study sheds light on the peculiar ‘normal’ phase of high-temperature superconductors

Science Daily  December 3, 2019 In the cuprate high-temperature superconductors, the metallic state above the highest transition temperature is anomalous and is known as the “strange metal.” An international team of researchers (USA – Stanford University, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, UC Berkeley, the Netherlands, Japan) studied this state using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. With increasing doping across a temperature-independent critical value pc ~ 0.19, they observed that near the Brillouin zone boundary, the strange metal, characterized by an incoherent spectral function, abruptly reconstructs into a more conventional metal with quasiparticles. Above the temperature of superconducting fluctuations, the pseudo gap also discontinuously […]