Credit: Srivats Rajasekaran, Max Planck Institute, Hamburg
The study shows that electron tunneling between adjacent layers in a copper oxide with striped phases (regions with different electronic properties, colored with light orange) at higher temperatures can indeed be induced. In the schematic, the black arrows correspond to a superconducting state confined within the stripes. Electrons from neighboring stripes can tunnel along the directions shown by the red arrows, but the currents tend to cancel out. By driving the electrons with high-intensity light, a high-frequency reflected signal has been detected, characteristic of 3-D superconductivity that is otherwise hidden.