English

Superconducting materials: the w$hole$ story

Superconductivity 2019-11-12 v1

Abstract

Ted Geballe has contributed enormously to the knowledge of superconducting materials during an illustrious scientific career spanning seven decades, encompassing groundbreaking discoveries and studies of both so-called conventional and unconventional superconductors. On the year of his 100th birthday I would like to argue that all superconducting materials that Ted investigated, as well as those he did not, have one thing in common that is not generally recognized: hole carriers. This includes PbTePbTe doped with TlTl, for which Ted has proposed that superconductivity is driven by negative-U pairing. I will discuss why hole carriers are necessary for a material to be a superconductor, and the implications of this for the understanding of the fundamental physics of superconductivity.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.04419,
  title  = {Superconducting materials: the w$hole$ story},
  author = {J. E. Hirsch},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.04419},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

To be published in Ted@100 Festschrift, a special issue of JSNM in honor of Ted Geballe's 100th birthday

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:45:46.623Z