Learning about High‐ $T_{c}$ Superconductors from Their Imperfections

MAR 01, 2000

Researchers in Berkeley and Tokyo have demonstrated the great potential of a scanning tunneling microscope for studying the behavior of superconductors on an atomic scale.

DOI: 10.1063/1.883014

Barbara Goss Levi

In the old nursery rhyme, little Jack Horner stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum. That’s more or less what experimenters from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Tokyo did recently: They stuck a zinc atom into the copper site of a high‐ $T_{c}$ superconductor and extracted a plum of an image using a specially developed scanning tunneling microscope (STM). That image provided dramatic visual confirmation of the d‐wave nature of the electron pairing state in such materials (see the cover of this issue).

This Content Appeared In

Volume 53, Number 3

Learning about High‐Tc Superconductors from Their Imperfections

Learning about High‐ $T_{c}$ Superconductors from Their Imperfections