Shedding light on superconducting disorder

25-Sep-2024 - The importance of disorder in physics is only matched by the difficulty to study it. For example, the remarkable properties of high-temperature superconductors are greatly affected by variations in the chemical composition of the solid. Techniques that enable measurements of such disorder and its ...

Quantum simulator enables first microscopic observation of charge carriers pairing

Research results could be key to understanding high-temperature superconductors

23-Jan-2023 - A team of researchers at the MPQ has for the first time monitored in an experiment how holes (positive charge carriers) in a solid-state model combined to form pairs. This process could play an important role in understanding high-temperature superconductivity. Using a quantum simulator, ...

Terahertz light from superconducting stripes

Scientists discover anomalous emission of terahertz radiation from copper oxides in which superconductivity coexists with charge-stripe order

27-Sep-2022 - Why do some materials carry electrical currents without any resistance only when cooled to near absolute zero while others do so at comparatively high temperatures? This key question continues to vex scientists studying the phenomenon of superconductivity. Now a team of researchers from Andrea ...

Long live superconductivity!

Pathbreaking advance: Short flashes of light with sustaining impact

09-Feb-2021 - Superconductivity – the ability of a material to transmit an electric current without loss – is a quantum effect that, despite years of research, is still limited to very low temperatures. Now a team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) in ...

The Higgs boson and superconductivity

New form of spectroscopy provides insights for the development of resistance-free current transport at ambient temperature

20-May-2020 - Without the Higgs mechanism, particles would have no mass. The Higgs boson, which was discovered in 2012, is therefore also referred to as the “God particle”. It arises as an oscillating excitation of the Higgs field, which penetrates the world. Superconductivity displays similar properties. ...

Shaking off the correlated-electron traffic jam

17-Mar-2020 - An international team of researchers from Switzerland, Germany, the USA and Great Britain has uncovered an anomalous metallic behavior in an otherwise insulating ceramic material. The team used ultrashort light pulses with a wide range of colors to watch what happens when the insulating quasi ...

Light-induced superconductivity under high pressure

14-May-2018 - A team of scientists of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science in Hamburg investigated optically-induced superconductivity in the alkali-doped fulleride K3C60under high external pressures. This study allowed, on one ...

Superconductors earn their stripes

06-Feb-2018 - New Terahertz techniques help to detect striped superconductivity above the superconducting transition temperature in cuprates. Understanding high temperature superconductivity (high Tc) has been a long-standing challenge since its discovery in copper oxide compounds in 1986. A key issue in ...

Charge order and electron localization in a molecule-based solid

23-Jan-2018 - Charge ordering in cationic mixed-valence compounds is of crucial importance for materials science. The prototypic example for a transition from a charge-disordered to a charge-ordered state has been magnetite, Fe3O4, where Evert Verwey observed a sudden jump in resistivity near -150°C. In the ...

Scientists shine new light on the “other high temperature superconductor”

15-Aug-2017 - A study led by scientists of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science in Hamburg presents evidence of the coexistence of superconductivity and “charge-density-waves” in compounds of the poorly-studied family of ...