Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Failing to see the superconducting transition

Stare at the figure below. Can you see any difference between the top and the bottom panels?
[You can left click on the figure to make it larger.]


Yes. There is essentially no difference. This is not boring. It is fascinating.
The figure is taken from a beautiful Science paper by Seamus Davis group. It represents images from the fourier transform of STM images of the surface of an underdoped cuprate superconductor. From bottom to top the temperature increases from 0.1Tc to 1.5Tc where Tc is the superconducting transition temperature.

Basically this shows that at low energies the pseudogap phase has the identical excitation spectrum as a phase-disordered version of the d-wave superconducting state.

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Remembering the student protestors who died 36 years ago

Memorial plaque in the Great Court of the University of Queensland today.