Wednesday, September 17, 2008

High-Temperature Superconductivity in the Iron Pnictides

The iron-arsenic based superconductors are the hottest material right now (outside of graphene) in condensed matter physics. The rush to study this almost mirrors what happened earlier with the cuprates and the MgB2 compounds. Plenty of papers are coming out on this right now.

This is an excellent overview by Mike Norman on the state of knowledge that we have currently on this compound. More importantly, the similarity between the FeAs-based compounds and the cuprates superconductors make this system exceedingly important to solve the mystery of superconductivity in these high-Tc superconductors.

It would be interesting to see a couple of years from now how what we know now would have changed, and if any of these observations and understanding are still valid. Things in this field change very rapidly.

Zz.

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