To be honest, this is a hunch thing more than a I can teach and explain it thing. To me it's just "a lot of the same stories" that are told about cuprates, and less of a "I can explain the mechanism".

Roughly, one of the "properties" that shows up with these materials is that the 3d orbitals of coper atoms are involved in forming the bands near the fermi level. Couple that with the fun story of Cu electron configuration being [Ar] 3d^10 4s^1, which suggests that spin-effects are "at play" with these electrons near their filling levels. Combine that with the spin-character properties of cuprate paring (eg. s-wave vs. d-wave superconductors, (d-wave for BSCCO for instance)). All together it lends itself to a nice spin-orbit coupled band "setup" at the fermi energy that I have a hunch somehow backs the underlying mechanism of these d-wave superconductors. Fully admit, there's some leaps there in the raw logic -- if I could fully explain it I probably would still be in the field, haha.

I'll note: I've been out of the field for ~8 years, but a quick google search led to some more recent papers [1][2] working through plausible explanations based on some of these copper d orbital shenanigans.

[1] https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=... [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.11664 (d-p, but includes the Cu d-orbital and also specifically states "We also show that the effect of the nearest-neighbor d-d Coulomb interaction Vdd is actually quite important for the stability of superconductivity and phase competition.")

> To me it's just "a lot of the same stories" that are told about cuprates, and less of a "I can explain the mechanism".

Fair enough, and thanks for the readout. I realized after posting I essentially demanded an explanation as to why the cuprates are high-Tc, which is probably it's own Nobel prize.

The internet is one of those places where if you are wrong, someone might well write a Nobel-worthy response just to win the argument.

https://www.wired.com/story/how-an-anonymous-4chan-post-help...

Nice one, reading that post makes me wonder if the proof could be furthered when considering parallels from compression algorithms.

Compression algorithms detect recurring blocks and remove them with a special symbol and I think the shortest path would be uncompressable with compression algorithms.

> To be honest, this is a hunch thing more than a I can teach and explain it thing...

Chiming in, not just you. :) I very briefly studied materials science a few decades ago and I'm 0% surprised that a potential breakthrough involves, of course, cuprates.

Very cool explanation, I didn’t understand a word you said

Any plans on going back to your field with these discoveries?

I really wish I'd went into physics in school. This all sounds deeply fascinating, but I just barely understand the top level of what you're explaining.