The behavior of cuprates, special superconducting materials made of copper and oxygen that in the future could reduce waste in the distribution of electricity, is less strange than expected: this is demonstrated by a study published in the journal Science and the result of the collaboration between Chalmers University of Goteborg , Polytechnic of Milan, Sapienza of Rome and European Synchrotron ESRF.
Superconductors are materials in which electric current travels without resistance below a certain temperature: this drastically differentiates them from normal metals, in which resistance involves the production of heat and therefore a waste of energy. Although known for more than a century, superconductivity remains one of the most mysterious and fascinating phenomena studied by the physics of solids: the goal is to find materials that are superconducting at room temperature.
An important property of cuprates is given by the fact that, even at a temperature above the critical one (when they are in the ‘normal’ state and therefore have no resistance to zero), they behave in an unconventional way, so much so that they are called ‘strange’ metals. The oddity lies in the linear increase in resistivity with temperature, which is not the case for normal metals. Understanding the ‘strangeness’ of the ‘normal’ state of superconducting cuprates is one of the goals of research in this field in recent years. The international study in which the Politecnico di Milano and Sapienza participate shows that, in the normal state, the presence of charge density waves modifies the ‘strange metal’ type behavior of cuprates and leads it to be more similar to that of normal metals.
“This type of observation is of great importance, because it finally shows a correlation between macroscopic properties (resistivity in the normal state, superconductivity) and microscopic properties (charge density waves)”, explains Giacomo Ghiringhelli, professor of Experimental Physics at Politecnico di Milano. “This may be the key to the problem long sought by theorists, a sure basis on which to finally build the explanation of the very original behavior of superconducting cuprates”.
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