Understanding strontium titanate’s odd behavior will aid efforts to develop materials that conduct electricity with 100 percent efficiency at higher temperatures.

These stripes of electron spin and charge are exciting because of their possible link to a phenomenon that could transform society by making electrical transmission nearly 100 percent efficient.

Tripling the energy and refining the shape of optical laser pulses at LCLS’s Matter in Extreme Conditions instrument allows researchers to recreate higher-pressure conditions and explore unsolved questions relevant to fusion energy, plasma physics and materials science.

Extraordinarily precise measurements -- within millionths of a billionth of a second and a billionth of a hair's breadth -- show this ‘electron-phonon coupling’ can be far stronger than predicted, and could potentially play a role in unconventional superconductivity.