ITHACA, N.Y. -- With equipment so sensitive that it can locate clusters of electrons, Cornell University and University of Tokyo physicists have -- sort of -- explained puzzling behavior in a much-studied high-temperature superconductor, perhaps leading to a better understanding of how such superconductors work.

It turns out that under certain conditions the electrons in the material pretty much ignore the atoms to which they are supposed to be attached, arranging themselves into a neat pattern that looks like a crystal lattice. The behavior occurs in a phase physicists have called a "pseudogap," but because the newly discovered arrangement looks like a checkerboard in scanning tunneling microscope (STM) images, J.C. Séamus Davis, Cornell professor of physics, calls the phenomenon a "checkerboard phase."

Davis, Hidenori Takagi, professor of physics at the University of Tokyo, and co-workers describe the observations in the Aug. 26, 2004, issue of the journal Nature. An article about the work also is scheduled to appear in the September issue of Physics Today.

"In at least one cuprate high-temperature superconducting material that phase is an electronic crystal," Davis reports. "We don't understand what we've found, but we have moved into unknown territory that everyone has wanted to explore. Many people have believed that to understand high-temperature superconductivity we have to look in this territory."

A superconductor is a material capable of conducting electricity with virtually no resistance. Modified crystals of copper oxide, known as cuprates, can become superconductors at temperatures up to about 150 Kelvin (-123 degrees Celsius or --253 degrees Fahrenheit) when they are doped with other atoms that create "holes" in the crystal structure where electrons would ordinarily be. These superconductors are widely used in industry, although there is still no clear explanation of how they work. Their superconducting behavior begins when about 10 percent of the electrons have been removed, but for over a decade physicists have been puzzled by what happens when somewhat fewer electrons are removed: The material conducts electricity, but just barely. In theory it shouldn't conduct at all.

Davis has now been able to observe this phase with a specially modified STM that measures, in effect, the quantum wave functions of the electrons in a sample.