The Business of Gadflies

Synopsis

Scaling behaviour is ubiquitous in physics and gives insights into diverse behaviour ranging from the quark structure of nucleons to the universality class of phase transitions.  In this colloquium, I will present a fundamental new scaling relation that appears to provide a universal description of the superfluid properties of a wide range of superconductors.  I will show how our collaboration, “The Business of Gadflies”, recently discovered the new scaling behaviour in the course of a long-running program aimed at testing the applicability of the Landau-BCS “Standard Model” of superconductivity to overdoped cuprate superconductors.