Physicists listened to electrical noise to crack a superconductor mystery
摘要
物理学家通过测量铜氧化物超导体中电流的微弱电噪声，为理解其高温超导机理提供了新线索。研究聚焦于超导转变温度以上出现的“赝能隙”现象，即部分电子在预期能量范围内似乎消失。由慕尼黑大学和乌得勒支大学研究人员领导的团队在《科学》发表成果，利用电噪声分析探索这一长期未解问题，但赝能隙成因仍需进一步研究。
Superconductors carry electricity without resistance, but most only work a few degrees above absolute zero. In the late 1980s, copper-based materials called cuprates were found to superconduct at higher temperatures—reachable with affordable liquid nitrogen. Yet nearly 40 years later, physicists still don't agree on why.
In a recent Science study, a team of physicists led by Milan Allan of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Ingmar Swart of Utrecht University in the Netherlands has found some answers by listening to the faint electrical crackle of current flowing into a cuprate.
The missing electrons
Central to the mystery of cuprates’ high-temperature superconductivity is a strange state called the pseudogap. “The pseudogap is a phenomenon of missing electrons,” Allan said. Above the temperature at which cuprates become superconducting, some of their electrons seem to vanish—measurements find far fewer of them at the energies where they should be. “Everybody knows that from different probes, you see that there's these vanishing electrons, but nobody knows why,” Allan said.
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