Artist’s impression: the description of electrons in strange metals (round particles) uses exactly the same mathematics as the description of spacetime in string theory (curved surface).
Artist's impression: the description of electrons in strange metals (round particles) uses exactly the same mathematics as the description of spacetime in string theory (curved surface) . What does a quantum theory of gravity have in common with electrons in a 'strange' metal? At first sight: not much, but this week in Nature a Dutch NWO consortium, including researchers Jake Ayres, Maarten Berben and Nigel Hussey (Radboud University), Jan Zaanen (Leiden University) and Erik van Heumen (University of Amsterdam) reports on new experimental findings that may point towards such a link after all. Superconductivity is a fascinating phenomenon in which, below a so-called critical temperature, a material loses all its resistance to electrical currents. In certain materials, at low temperatures, all electrons are entangled in a single, macroscopic quantum state, meaning that they no longer behave as individual particles but as a collective - resulting in superconductivity. The general theory for this collective electron behaviour has been known for a long time, but one family of materials, the cuprates , refuses to conform to the paradigm. It was long thought that for these materials the mechanism that 'glues together' the electrons must be special, but recently the attention has shifted and now physicists investigate the -superconducting states of cuprates, hoping to find out their differences with normal superconductors. Strange metals.
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