16 March 2015

Professor Louis Taillefer’s lab at the Université de Sherbrooke continues to unravel the mystery of high-temperature superconductivity: the team has discovered a new state of matter in cuprates.

Louis Taillefer and Nicolas Doiron-Leyraud

Made from copper and oxygen, cuprates are the most promising superconductors. Researchers are studying them for quantum oscillations in particular. These have proven to be the most direct signature of electrons in a metal.

To detect the oscillations of electrons in cuprates in an even more precise way, Professor Taillefer’s lab has developed a device based on thermos-electric properties – and not just electric properties.

The result: the work, carried out in collaboration with the University of British Columbia and the Laboratoire national des champs magnétiques intenses (National Laboratory for Intense Magnetic Fields) in Toulouse, has enabled the detection of an all new frequency of oscillations.

“This discovery has now given us a comprehensive picture of the electronic structure of cuprates, and above all it has enabled us to understand its origin. Therefore, it has become a new starting point to understand several other phenomena related to cuprates and, maybe one day, the cause of their high-temperature superconductivity,” said Nicolas Doiron-Leyraud, one of the authors of the article published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications in January 2015.

Source and photo credit: Université de Sherbrooke

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