Credit: Image courtesy Jörg Harms, Max-Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter.
In equilibrium (top), the charge stripe "ripples" run perpendicular to each other between the copper-oxide layers of the material. When a mid-infrared laser pulse strikes the material (middle), it "melts" these conflicting ripples and induces superconductivity (bottom). The experimenters used a carefully synchronized x-ray laser to take this femtosecond–fast "movie" to reveal how quickly the charge stripes melt.