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As a physicist studying cuprates, I would caution that many of the strongest claims in the Quanta article are basically clickbait, especially the title of the a

As a physicist studying cuprates, I would caution that many of the strongest claims in the Quanta article are basically clickbait, especially the title of the article, and the notion that this experiment has solved the problem "to nearly everyone's satisfaction". The actual experiment and resulting paper [0] on the other hand are very good work, and may very well be right, but a substantial amount more work will be needed to determine how much of the rather unusual phenomenology of the cuprates is well-explained by superexchange interactions. I guess even more work will be needed to convince the majority of the field that this the right model for the cuprates, as opposed to any of the very many other models that have been proposed and studied in the past few decades. In particular: - High temperature superconductivity is not the only strange thing about the cuprates. The normal state (i.e. above the superconducting transition temperature) also has some rather unusual properties that are the subject of much of the current research. Some of these properties can probably be explained as arising from superexchange interactions, but I expect not all of them can. - BSCCO is one of quite a large family of cuprate compounds. In this case, it was almost certainly chosen because it cleaves easily, producing nice surfaces which are necessary for this type of experiment. On the other hand, it is quite structurally complicated, and in some sense "messy" compared to many of the other commonly-studied compounds. This is actually taken advantage of for the experiment discussed here, but it would be interesting (if possible) to see if a similar result can be replicated in any of the other cuprates. Anyway, this is quite an interesting experiment, but I'm somewhat dissapointed in the Quanta article for such sensationalistic reporting. I suppose that's to be expected for a popular science article. [0] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2207449119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2207449119

dav_Oz 4y ago
Thanks for your insight. Most people reading sci-pop articles are by now hopefully used to sensationalism. But I think in this case (which can be equally bad) the journalist only spoke to codensed matter physicists biased towards or having a stake in the superexchange explanation, normally one would at least incorporate one skeptical position (such as yours, even if it's a minority one) in yet unsettled cases rather than just letting decency speak out of the scientists themselves: >But Yazdani and other researchers caution that there’s still a chance, however remote, that glue strength and ease of hopping move in lockstep for some other reason, and that the field is falling into the classic correlation-equals-causation trap. For Yazdani, the real way to prove a causal relationship will be to harness superexchange to engineer some flashy new superconductors.
- z2h-a6n 4y ago
  The people quoted in the article are all fairly well known in the field, and while I obviously can't speak for them (especially because each of them alone has much more experience in the field than I do) I expect that they generally have realistic rather than what I might call sensationalistic views of this result. I expect this is also true of the authors of the work in question, though of course they may be even more excited about the result (with good reason). To be clear, this is an interesting result, and is certainly food for thought, but I think it's too soon to tell how much of the "cuprate problem" it solves. I my guess that the sensationalism in the article is just a combination of overexcitement and misinterpretation by the journalist. I think most people in the field would agree that this result is interesting, and could end up being quite important. If the journalist heard something like this from everyone he asked, he may have misinterpreted this as the matter being "settled" in the view of most of the community.

dav_Oz 4y ago

Thanks for your insight. Most people reading sci-pop articles are by now hopefully used to sensationalism. But I think in this case (which can be equally bad) the journalist only spoke to codensed matter physicists biased towards or having a stake in the superexchange explanation, normally one would at least incorporate one skeptical position (such as yours, even if it's a minority one) in yet unsettled cases rather than just letting decency speak out of the scientists themselves: >But Yazdani and other researchers caution that there’s still a chance, however remote, that glue strength and ease of hopping move in lockstep for some other reason, and that the field is falling into the classic correlation-equals-causation trap. For Yazdani, the real way to prove a causal relationship will be to harness superexchange to engineer some flashy new superconductors.

z2h-a6n 4y ago
The people quoted in the article are all fairly well known in the field, and while I obviously can't speak for them (especially because each of them alone has much more experience in the field than I do) I expect that they generally have realistic rather than what I might call sensationalistic views of this result. I expect this is also true of the authors of the work in question, though of course they may be even more excited about the result (with good reason). To be clear, this is an interesting result, and is certainly food for thought, but I think it's too soon to tell how much of the "cuprate problem" it solves. I my guess that the sensationalism in the article is just a combination of overexcitement and misinterpretation by the journalist. I think most people in the field would agree that this result is interesting, and could end up being quite important. If the journalist heard something like this from everyone he asked, he may have misinterpreted this as the matter being "settled" in the view of most of the community.