Stripe ordering in the Cuprates

Upon cooling, many materials undergo an electronic phase transition leading to infinite conductivity. This state of matter, known as superconductivity, was first discovered in 1911 by Kamerlingh Onnes while working with liquefied helium [Onnes]. At 4.2K he discovered that the resistivity of mercury dropped below detectable values. Shortly after this discovery, many other elements, such as tin, were also observed to exhibit zero resistance at extremely low temperatures. Indeed, the discovery of superconductivity in simple systems was necessarily delayed until refrigeration techniques advanced sufficiently to reach temperatures close to absolute zero. The discovery of superconductivity came as a shock to the scientific community. As mercury cools, scientists expected that the resulting state would consist of bound immobile electrons; leading to the expectation that mercury would act as an insulator as temperatures were suppressed towards absolute zero. This unexpected deviation from theory sparked interest in understanding the underlying mechanism responsible for this new phase of matter. However, decades passed before a satisfactory explanation was supplied by Bardeen, Cooper, and Schriefer in thier famous paper outlining BCS Theory in 1957 [Bardeen]. This theory identified the charge carriers as a coherent state of electron pairs, known as Cooper pairs, bound together by phonon interactions. The binding energy of these Cooper pairs was shown to be proportional to