General Relativity and the Cuprates
Abstract
We add a periodic potential to the simplest gravitational model of a superconductor and compute the optical conductivity. In addition to a superfluid component, we find a normal component that has Drude behavior at low frequency followed by a power law fall-off. Both the exponent and coefficient of the power law are temperature independent and agree with earlier results computed above Tc. These results are in striking agreement with measurements on some cuprates. We also find a gap = 4.0\ Tc, a rapidly decreasing scattering rate, and "missing spectral weight" at low frequency, all of which also agree with experiments.
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