THIS WEEK IN SCIENCE

摘要

More than 20 years after their appearance, it is still unclear how the charge carriers in the high-temperature superconducting cuprates pair up and condense into the superconducting state. Some scenarios argue for a boson-mediated "glue" to bring them together, as in conventional superconductors, whereas in other scenarios, the glue is unnecessary and electronic correlation provides the necessary pairing energy. Pasupathy et al. (p. 196) now present temperature-dependent scanning tunneling spectroscopy data above and below the superconducting transition temperature that they believe to be strong evidence for the latter "no glue" picture.