Researchers Turn Up the Heat In Superconductivity Hunt

摘要

When Peter Johnson and colleagues set out to study the behavior of electrons in high-temperature superconductors, their experiments raised more than a few eyebrows. In 1999, Johnson, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, systematically blasted electrons out of a superconductor with bursts of photons. The technique, called angle-resolved photoemission (ARPES), can reveal intricate details about how electrons behave inside a material. The Brookhaven team's results, however, flew in the face of other ARPES results as well as other types of electron-tracking experiments.