Grand Unifying Theory of High-Temp Superconducting Materials Proposed

[sir pball]

Conventional superconductivity (basically what happens in some pure metals when they're cooled to liquid helium temperatures) has been adequately explained for fifty years by BCS theory. But so far, high-temperature "exotic" superconductivity (mostly complex ceramics cooled by "only" liquid nitrogen) has been a mystery; there's no single simple electronic phenomenon that appears in all the different classes of materials that exhibit unconventional superconductivity, rather, they all behave in different, complex, ways. But..

Now Séamus Davis, a physicist who's conducted experiments on many of these materials at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Cornell University, and Dung-Hai Lee, a theorist at DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, postulate a set of key principles for understanding the superconductivity and the variety of "intertwined" electronic phenomena that applies to all the families of high-Tc superconductors.

The already dense enough summary is here; if you understand spin-density waves and the Pomeranchuk instability, the full paper (free!) is here.