Second Family of High-Temperature Superconductors Discovered -- Cho 2008 (417): 1 -- ScienceNOW

Second Family of High-Temperature Superconductors Discovered -- Cho 2008 (417): 1 -- ScienceNOW

Researchers in Japan and China have discovered a new family of high-temperature superconductors--materials that conduct electricity without any resistance at inexplicably high temperatures. Physicists around the world are hailing the discovery of the new iron-and-arsenic compounds as a major advance, as the only other high-temperature superconductors are the copper-and-oxygen compounds, or cuprates, that were discovered in 1986. Those older materials netted a Nobel and ignited a firestorm of research, but physicists still don't agree about how they work, leaving high-temperature superconductivity the biggest mystery in condensed matter physics. Some researchers hope the new materials will help solve it.

"It's possible that these materials will provide a cleaner system to work with, and suddenly [the physics of] the cuprates will become clearer," says Hai-Hu Wen, a physicist at the Institute of Physics (IoP) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. But Philip Anderson, a theorist at Princeton University and a Nobel Laureate, says that the new superconductors will be more important if they don't work like the old one. "If it's really a new mechanism, God knows where it will go," he says.

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