Researchers believe they may have identified a new state of matter in the behaviors of Cooper pairs of electrons. Scientists from Brown University and several universities and consortia in China combined their efforts to study this “third state” phenomenon. “Between the superconducting and insulating regimes, we detect a robust intervening anomalous metallic state,” their abstract says.
Cooper pairs are an enigmatic quantum phenomenon. These electron pairs are either so active that they become superconductors, as bosons, or so static that they become insulators. As scientists have studied the idea of superconductors, they’ve realized Cooper pairing is the reason for the season. It was Brown’s own Leon Cooper who discovered and identified Cooper pairs and won the Nobel Prize for his role in describing how they enable superconductivity.
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