Lab Home | Phone | Search
Center for Nonlinear Studies  Center for Nonlinear Studies
 Home 
 People 
 Current 
 Affiliates 
 Visitors 
 Students 
 Research 
 ICAM-LANL 
 Publications 
 Conferences 
 Workshops 
 Sponsorship 
 Talks 
 Colloquia 
 Colloquia Archive 
 Seminars 
 Postdoc Seminars Archive 
 Quantum Lunch 
 Quantum Lunch Archive 
 CMS Colloquia 
 Q-Mat Seminars 
 Q-Mat Seminars Archive 
 P/T Colloquia 
 Archive 
 Kac Lectures 
 Kac Fellows 
 Dist. Quant. Lecture 
 Ulam Scholar 
 Colloquia 
 
 Jobs 
 Postdocs 
 CNLS Fellowship Application 
 Students 
 Student Program 
 Visitors 
 Description 
 Past Visitors 
 Services 
 General 
 
 History of CNLS 
 
 Maps, Directions 
 CNLS Office 
 T-Division 
 LANL 
 
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
CNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690)

Colloquium

On the energy budget of cuprate superconductors

Achim Kempf
University of Waterloo and The institute for Quantum Computing

Cuprate superconductors have in common that they consist of parallel planes of copper oxide separated by layers whose composition can vary. Being ceramics, these superconductors are poor conductors above the transition temperature, Tc. Below Tc, the parallel Cu–O planes in those materials become superconducting while the layers in between stay poor conductors. As the material is cooled to below Tc, charge and current fluctuations along the now superconducting ab planes should increase. This should lead to an increased van der Waals / Casimir attractive force in between these layers, and this should be associated with a negative van der Waals / Casimir energy. Here, we ask to what extent the lowering of the inter-plane van der Waals/Casimir energy that arises when the parallel Cu–O layers become superconducting could contribute to the superconducting condensation energy. Could this change in energy pay for the energetic expense of the formation of Cooper pairs? This would of course not at all explain how, microscopically, Cooper pairs form. But it may give a hint that the sought-after microscopic mechanism that makes Cooper pairs form could be driven energetically by an effect that operates on a significantly larger scale: the van der Waals / Casimir effect emerges from the interaction of charge and current fluctuations on one layer with the charge and current fluctuations on a neighboring layer. To estimate the size of the effect, the material is here crudely modeled as consisting below Tc of parallel plasma sheets separated by vacuum and as not possessing a significant van der Waals / Casimir effect above Tc. It is found that below Tc, due to the close proximity of the Cu–O planes the system should be in the regime where TM "surface" plasmons, namely TM plasmons that propagate along the superconducting ab planes, dominate the van der Waals/Casimir effect. Within this crude model, the change in the van der Waals/Casimir energy when cooling through Tc is indeed found to be of the same order of magnitude as the superconducting condensation energy. This model implies that High Tc cuprates exhibit a predictable small but potentially measurable contraction in the c-direction as they are cooled through Tc.

Host: Alexander Gutfraind, gfriend@lanl.gov