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Science 2 July 1999:
Vol. 285. no. 5424, p. 9
DOI: 10.1126/science.285.5424.9d
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This Week in Science

In superconductors, electrons condense into Cooper pairs and move freely throughout the material. If the material is defective, the pairs can be broken as they come into contact with the scattering centers and form quasiparticles. Such scattering effects in the high-temperature superconductors have been predicted theoretically but have so far remained elusive to experimental verification. Hudson et al. (p. 88; see the Perspective by Atkinson and MacDonald) used scanning probe microscopy to show that even far below the superconducting transition temperature, there are many such atomic-scale scattering centers. This result also confirms the d-wave nature of the superconducting gap.




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