cuprates – Quanta Magazine

Meet Strange Metals: Where Electricity May Flow Without Electrons

Charlie Wood — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 16:22:10 +0000

After a year of trial and error, Liyang Chen had managed to whittle down a metallic wire into a microscopic strand half the width of an E.coli bacterium — just thin enough to allow a trickle of electric current to pass through. The drips of that current might, Chen hoped, help settle a persistent mystery about how charge moves through a bewildering class of materials known as strange metals. Chen...

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High-Temperature Superconductivity Understood at Last

Charlie Wood — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 14:06:52 +0000

For decades, a family of crystals has stumped physicists with its baffling ability to superconduct — that is, carry an electric current without any resistance — at far warmer temperatures than other materials. Now, an experiment years in the making has directly visualized superconductivity on the atomic scale in one of these crystals, finally revealing the cause of the phenomenon to nearly...

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Taming Superconductors With String Theory

Kevin Hartnett — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 18:11:09 +0000

String theory was devised as a way to unite the laws of quantum mechanics with those of gravity, with the goal of creating the vaunted “theory of everything.” Subir Sachdev is taking the “everything” literally. He’s applying the mathematics of string theory to a major problem at the other end of physics — the behavior of a potentially revolutionary class of materials known as high-temperature...

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Signs of a Stranger, Deeper Side to Nature’s Building Blocks

Natalie Wolchover — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 18:53:33 +0000

According to modern quantum theory, energy fields permeate the universe, and flurries of energy in these fields, called “particles” when they are pointlike and “waves” when they are diffuse, serve as the building blocks of matter and forces. But new findings suggest this wave-particle picture offers only a superficial view of nature’s constituents. If each energy field pervading space is thought...

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