Condensation energy and high-Tc superconductivity -: art. no. 140501

From an analysis of the specific heat of one of the cuprate superconductors it is shown that even if a large part of the experimental specific heat associated with the superconducting phase transition is due to fluctuations, this part must be counted when one tries to extract the condensation energy, E-cond, from the data. Previous work where the fluctuation part was subtracted has resulted in an incorrect estimation of E-cond.