Suffolk Reporter

A team of researchers led by scientists at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has made new observations on unconventional superconductors. These materials can conduct electricity without loss at higher temperatures than regular superconductors, although these temperatures remain extremely cold. The study focused on a slow process known as atomic relaxation in cuprate superconductors, observed using X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy at the Coherent Hard X-ray Scattering beamline (CHX) at NSLS-II, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The research aimed to understand how atomic relaxation changes in the presence of two quantum states: charge density waves (CDWs) and the superconducting state itself. "This observation of slow atomic motion is a new way to look at things," said Joshua Turner, lead scientist from SLAC and principal investigator with the Stanford Institute for Materials Science and Engineering (SIMES). He emphasized that this approach could reveal interesting insights into electron behavior in complex systems.

The study revealed that atomic relaxation took about 1,000 seconds in the cuprate studied. Researchers found that atoms moved further from their average positions and slowed down when CDWs were present. However, as the material approached its superconducting state, this effect reversed, accelerating relaxation.

"This insight gives scientists a whole new way to explore how these quantum states intertwine on slow time scales," said Lingjia Shen, an associate staff scientist with SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray laser.

The research involved collaboration with CHX beamline scientists Andrei Fluerasu and Xiaoqian M. Chen and included contributions from researchers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Waterloo in Ontario, and Lund University in Sweden. Primary funding was provided by the DOE Office of Science.