Abstract
The new high-temperature superconductors are close to a Mott metal-insulator transition; pure La 2 CuO 4 undergoes a commensurate charge-density-wave transition to an insulating state. For other compositions, the incipient transition drastically softens the plasmon modes whose wave vectors connect points on the Fermi surface. These soft plasmons (characteristically several tenths of an electron-volt) replace phonons as the “glue” which binds Cooper pairs. This yields transition temperatures an order of magnitude larger than for phonon-induced superconductivity. One of the factors making for strong electron-plasmon coupling is the influence of the vacant f-orbitals of La or Ba.
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