University of British Columbia physicists have detected 'charge ordering' in electron-doped cuprate superconductors for the first time, according to research published today in Science.

Charge ordering is a ripple-like instability at the electron level that competes with superconductivity and likely suppresses the temperature at which materials demonstrate superconducting properties. Until now, researchers had only observed the phenomenon in other forms of cuprate materials.

"The universality of charge ordering across these very different materials shifts our perspective, and could propel future breakthroughs," says Eduardo H. da Silva Neto with UBC's Quantum Matter Institute and the Max-Planck-UBC Centre for Quantum Materials, who led the experiment with researcher Riccardo Comin.

"We need to understand how charge ordering is formed in materials and ideally tune it, allowing superconductivity to occur at temperatures closer to room temperature," adds da Silva Neto, who is a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research postdoctoral fellow at UBC.

"Our work opens up a new avenue to study charge ordering and the mysteries of superconductivity in these materials," says UBC professor Andrea Damascelli, leader of the research team. "Now we can compare and contrast characteristics that are common across both flavors of copper-based materials -- both hole- and electron-doped."

Doping involves adding impurities (electrons or 'holes') into materials in order to spur the material to exhibit unusual behaviors such as high-temperature superconductivity.

Recent superconductivity research on charge ordering in hole-doped cuprates has focused on understanding its connection to another mysterious state: the pseudogap. Most experiments suggest that the pseudogap is a necessary ingredient to charge ordering, and consequently the suppression of superconducting properties.

But the UBC research indicates that the pseudogap is not a prerequisite for charge ordering in electron-doped materials.

This story is reprinted from material from The University of British Columbia, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier. Link to original source.