High-temperature superconductivity: the explanation

Abstract

Soon after the discovery of the first high-temperature superconductor by Georg Bednorz and Alex Müller in 1986, the late Sir Nevill Mott in answering his own question ‘Is there an explanation?’ (1987 Nature327 185) expressed the view that the Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC) of small bipolarons, predicted by us in 1981, could be the one. Several authors then contemplated BEC of real-space tightly bound pairs, but with a purely electronic mechanism of pairing rather than with an electron–phonon interaction (EPI). However, a number of other researchers criticized the bipolaron (or any real-space pairing) scenario as incompatible with some angle-resolved photoemission spectra, with experimentally determined effective masses of carriers and unconventional symmetry of the superconducting order parameter in cuprates. Since then, the controversial issue of whether EPI is crucial for high-temperature superconductivity or is weak and inessential has been one of the most challenging problems of contemporary condensed matter physics. Here I outline some developments in the bipolaron theory suggesting that the true origin of high-temperature superconductivity is found in a proper combination of strong electron–electron correlations with a significant finite-range (Fröhlich) EPI, and that the theory is fully compatible with key experiments.