High Temperature Superconductivity: the explanation

Abstract

Soon after the discovery of the first high temperature superconductor by Georg Bednorz and Alex Mueller in 1986 the late Sir Nevill Mott answering his own question "Is there an explanation?" [Nature v 327 (1987) 185] expressed a view that the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of small bipolarons, predicted by us in 1981, could be the one. Several authors then contemplated BEC of real space tightly bound pairs, but with a purely electronic mechanism of pairing rather than with the electron-phonon interaction (EPI). However, a number of other researchers criticized the bipolaron (or any real-space pairing) scenario as incompatible with some angle-resolved photoemission spectra (ARPES), with experimentally determined effective masses of carriers and unconventional symmetry of the superconducting order parameter in cuprates. Since then the controversial issue of whether the electron-phonon interaction (EPI) is crucial for high-temperature superconductivity or weak and inessential has been one of the most challenging problems of contemporary condensed matter physics. Here I outline some developments in the bipolaron theory suggesting that the true origin of high-temperature superconductivity is found in a proper combination of strong electron-electron correlations with a significant finite-range (Froehlich) EPI, and that the theory is fully compatible with the key experiments.

8 pages, 2 figures, invited comment to Physica Scripta

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Many-body bound states and induced interactions of charged impurities in a bosonic bath
• Separating pairing from quantum phase coherence dynamics above the superconducting transition by femtosecond spectroscopy
• Quantum-limited thermometry of a Fermi gas with a charged spin particle
• Perspectives of the disproportionation driven superconductivity in strongly correlated 3d compounds
• Quantum simulation of extended polaron models using compound atom-ion systems
• Topological structures in unconventional scenario for 2D cuprates
• The Effect of Next-Nearest Neighbour Hopping in the One, Two, and Three Dimensional Holstein Model
• Optimal interlayer hopping and high temperature Bose-Einstein condensation of local pairs in quasi 2D superconductors
• Effect of screening of the electron-phonon interaction on the temperature of Bose-Einstein condensation of intersite bipolarons