Probing High Temperature Superconductors with X-rays
Friday, April 7 at 3 pm in VW 104
Clement Burns Ph.D., Western Michigan University
Superconducting materials display a variety of unusual phenomenon, including the ability to carry electrical currents without resistance and the expulsion of magnetic fields from their volume. Many of these systems are well understood, but over the last couple of decades several new classes of exotic superconductors have been discovered which cannot be explained with current theory. In this talk I will discuss recent work using a free electron laser x-ray source at the SLAC accelerator laboratory to study the high temperature superconductor YBa2Cu4O7-x. Electrons in these systems show a new type of charge order which competes with the superconductivity, and this charge ordering may play an important role in the properties of these materials.