High-Tc Superconductors may vibrate after all

Science : Tiny vibrations could shake up physicists’ understanding of high-temperature superconductors. In ordinary superconductors, quantized vibrations, or “phonons,” provide the glue that binds electrons in pairs, and they then zip through the material unimpeded. But for various reasons, most physicists believe phonons have little to do with high-temperature superconductors’ ability to conduct electricity with zero resistance at temperatures up to 138 kelvin. Now, ultraprecise measurements may nudge researchers to reconsider that assumption."I’m very happy that these results seem to be consistent with what we have been saying,” says Zhi-Xun Shen, an experimenter at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who has reported other evidence of electron-phonon interactions in high-temperature superconductors. However, some researchers argue that the vibrations seen in the new work are an experimental artifact. Read