Personal history of my engagement with cuprate superconductivity, 1986-2010

Abstract

Six months ago I was asked to write a personal history of my engagement with the high-Tc problem of the cuprate superconductors, in rather informal and autobiographical style. As the work proceeded I realized that it was impossible and would have been dishonest to separate out my rather amusing but seminal early fumblings from the complete restructuring of the problem which I have achieved during the past decade. But the result became considerably too long, by over half, for its intended recipient. The assignment had left me with no obligation to deal with all the fascinating but irrelevant phenomenology which I had more or less instinctively ignored on my way, but that feature also fails to endear the article to any conceivable editorial board containing knowledgeable experts on the subject. Also, their purpose was for it to serve as a (quote) introduction to the more technical debates, but its message is that almost all of these are not relevant. They are not, on the whole, focused on achieving understanding of the crucial experimental anomalies, many, if not most, of which are now understood. The key to the problem is a new method of dealing with the constrained Hilbert space which follows from the necessity of Gutzwiller projection.

References in corpus (7)

• An Intrinsic Bond-Centered Electronic Glass with Unidirectional Domains in Underdoped Cuprates
• Theory of the Nernst effect near quantum phase transitions in condensed matter, and in dyonic black holes
• Visualizing pair formation on the atomic scale in the high-Tc superconductor Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+d
• Protected nodes and the collapse of the Fermi arcs in high Tc cuprates
• Angle dependent magnetoresistance measurements in Tl${}_2$Ba${}_2$CuO${}_{6+\delta }$ and the need for anisotropic scattering
• Bose Fluids Above Tc: Incompressible Vortex Fluids and "Supersolidity"
• Bogoliubov angle and visualization of particle-hole mixture in superconductors

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Two superconducting components with different symmetries in Nd1-xSrxNiO2 films
• A Phenomenological Theory of the Anomalous Pseudogap Phase in Underdoped Cuprates
• Plaquette Valence Bond Theory of High-Temperature Superconductivity
• Strong-coupling analysis of scanning tunneling spectra in Bi${}_2$Sr${}_2$Ca${}_2$Cu${}_3$O${}_{10+\delta }$
• Leading theories of the cuprate superconductivity: a critique
• An Investigation of Particle-Hole Asymmetry in the Cuprates via Electronic Raman Scattering
• Real-Space Visualization of Remnant Mott Gap and Magnon Excitations
• Modern Physics of the Condensed State: Strong Correlations and Quantum Topology
• Grand-canonical variational approach for the t-J model
• Superconductivity of Bad Fermions: Origin of Two Gaps in HTSC Cuprates