A new look at high-temperature superconductors - MIT News Office

A new look at high-temperature superconductors - MIT News Office: Previous experiments have shown that above the transition temperature, there is a peculiar state where, Gedik says, “the material starts to behave very weirdly”: Its electrons act in unusual ways, which some physicists believe is caused by a phenomenon called charge-density waves. While the electron density in most conductors is uniform, Gedik explains, in materials with charge-density waves the density is distributed in a sinusoidal pattern, somewhat like ripples on a pond...

Some researchers have proposed that these waves are elusive in high-temperature superconductors because they fluctuate very rapidly, at speeds measured in picoseconds...


His team has spent years perfecting methods for studying the movement of electrons by zapping them with laser pulses lasting just a few femtoseconds (or quadrillionths of a second), and then detecting the results with a separate laser beam.

Using that method, the researchers have now detected these fluctuating waves...