The Polaronic Basis for High-Temperature Superconductivity*

In 2014, a review of 56 panels was published by the present author, with the aim to describe, using the concept of polarons, the properties of the superconductivity in the hole-doped cuprates. Anderson assumed in his paper that the mobility of the negative-U center could be neglected because of the presence of the random electrical potential present in disordered materials. The electronic single-band t-J theory and those related to it predicted a d-wave symmetry for the superfluid. Photoemission, tunneling, and especially the much hailed tricrystal experiments of Tsuei and Kirtley apparently proved the reality of this prediction and contributed to the acceptance of these theories. In these theories, the Born–Oppenheimer principle, in which the electronic degrees of freedom can be decoupled from the motion of atomic nuclei, mostly valid in condensed matter physics, is valid, as evident from the essential presence of bipolarons.