Physicists listened to electrical noise to crack a superconductor mystery

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.

Over the decades, physicists have put forward two main competing explanations. The first hypothesizes that the electrons get stuck in some sort of structure. In this view, electrons freeze into patterns, such as charge density waves, and superconductivity develops separately. The alternative explanation tightly links this phenomenon to superconductivity. “Other people think they’re missing because they form pairs,” Allan said. Pairs of electrons, called Cooper pairs, are what carry current in a superconductor. If, as the material cools, these pairs appear before the material becomes superconducting, they would be a precondition of superconductivity, a waiting room of sorts, where pairs exist but can’t yet move together in lockstep.

Settling this proved extremely hard. “Lots of different experimental signatures are kind of lumped inside this,” Allan said. Different instruments all see something, but their readings, Allan said, are never conclusive. “It’s always something kind of incoherent, hard to grasp,” he said. What the researchers needed was a way to see pairs directly, and Allan and his colleagues figured it out.