I want to first thank my advisor, Juan Carlos Campuzano, for his understanding, his seemingly infinite patience and, of course, his advice, which often went beyond the scientific. I am also indebted to professors Utpal Chatterjee and Dirk Morr for several key suggestions which helped this project come to fruition. (I am particularly grateful to Professor Chatterjee for kindly sharing a large data set analyzed in this work.) I must also thank my colleague, Hao Xu, for his perseverance, positive attitude, and resourcefulness in solving the many technical difficulties that plagued our experiment. I am grateful to Fanny Rodolakis and Cris Adriano for helpful advice during the many hours spent at the synchrotron facility during the first two years of my research. It is also a great pleasure for me to acknowledge the outstanding work performed by the instrument makers at UIC; in particular, Kevin Lynch, Bob Kurdydyk, Rick Frueh, and Rich Djoutrek. The many parts they fabricated for us, their aid in the design process, and the instrumentation difficulties they helped us overcome, are testimony to a contribution to this work that cannot be overstated. Also at UIC, I wish to thank the graduate student advisor James Nell for his patience and his eagerness to help, not just me, but also other physics graduate students. I am equally grateful to Derrick Stanley and Brian Shim for placing orders for me in a timely fashion and keeping our accounts under control.Professors Mark Schlossman and Anjum Ansari also deserve special mention. Aside from being outstanding physics instructors, they provided me with a better appreciation of the true nature of scientific research by kindly allowing me to work in their labs as an undergraduate assistant. iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (Continued)I also want to thank my defense committee for their interest in my work and for making part of an important event in my career.On a more personal side, I would like to extend my gratitude to my family, especially to my parents, for their unfaltering support and encouragement throughout my life. This work is theirs. Likewise, I would like to thank my partner, Christine Miller, for her kindness and for the affection she always knew how to express when I most needed it. Finally, I should very much like to thank the friends I made during my stay at UIC, as well as my old childhood friends from Colombia. It is no exaggeration to say that through all our bickering, arguing, joking, laughing, agreeing and disagreeing, they have left an indelible mark in my memory and thought.
v
SUMMARYWhen cooled to temperatures well below the condensation point of helium, most elemental metals exhibit a remarkable property: they conduct electricity without energy dissipation.Within the theory of Bardeen, Cooper, and Schieffer (BCS), this behavior is due to an attractive interaction between electrons made possible by local distortions of the ionic lattice. Due to this pairing interaction, the system condenses into a collection of so-called Cooper pairs, lowering the free energy and sup...