Abstract
One of the most striking features of the recently reported experimental data on the new high-temperature copper-oxide superconductors is the apparent disagreement between the photoabsorption and some of the tunneling measurements of the superconducting gap. It is argued here that this may not be an experimental artifact, but rather reflects the novel nature of the pairing in the resonating-valence-bond state: The lowest-lying quasiparticle excitations consist of pairs of neutral solitons. Thus, the superconducting gap can be measured in tunneling, but not in the photoabsorption. The nature of the expected absorption spectrum, and the analogy with doped polyacetylene is also discussed.