It’s one of the most stubborn open questions of modern physics: What’s the mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity? All superconductors need some way of binding their electrons, which are fermions, into quasiparticles called Cooper pairs, which act as bosons. The low-temperature superconductivity in metals is well described by the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory, which states that the pairs are held together by phonons. But in 1986, cuprate ceramics were discovered to superconduct at a much higher temperature via a different, unknown mechanism. Despite four decades of research and the discovery of many other unconventional superconducting materials, their mechanism remains a mystery.
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