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).

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