More Like this

1. The 2021 Room-Temperature Superconductivity Roadmap

   Boeri, L.; Hennig, R.; Hirschfeld, P.; Profeta, G.; Sanna, A.; Zurek, E.; Pickett, W. E.; Amsler, M.; Dias, R.; Eremets, M. I.; et al (October 2021, Journal of physics)

   Boeri, L.; Hennig, R.; Hirschfeld, P.; Profeta, G.; Sanna, A.; Zurek, E. (Ed.)

   Last year, the report of Room-Temperature Superconductivity in high-pressure carbonaceous sulfur hydride marked a major milestone in the history of physics: one of the holy grails of condensed matter research was reached after more than one century of continuing efforts. This long path started with Neil Ashcroft’s and Vitaly Ginzburg’s visionary insights on high-temperature superconductivity in metallic hydrogen in the 60’s and 70’s, and has led to the current hydride fever, following the report of high-Tc high-pressure superconductivity in H3S in 2014. This Roadmap collects selected contributions from many of the main actors in this exciting chapter of condensed matter history. Key for the rapid progress of this field has been a new course for materials discovery, where experimental and theoretical discoveries proceed hand in hand. The aim of this Roadmap is not only to offer a snapshot of the current status of superconductor materials research, but also to define the theoretical and experimental obstacles that must be overcome for us to realize fully exploitable room temperature superconductors, and foresee future strategies and research directions. This means improving synthesis techniques, extending first-principles methods for superconductors and structural search algorithms for crystal structure predictions, but also identifying new approaches to material discovery based on artificial intelligence. 

   more » « less
2. Elastocaloric determination of the phase diagram of Sr2RuO4

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04820-z  

   Li, You-Sheng; Garst, Markus; Schmalian, Jörg; Ghosh, Sayak; Kikugawa, Naoki; Sokolov, Dmitry A.; Hicks, Clifford W.; Jerzembeck, Fabian; Ikeda, Matthias S.; Hu, Zhenhai; et al (July 2022, Nature)

   Abstract One of the main developments in unconventional superconductivity in the past two decades has been the discovery that most unconventional superconductors form phase diagrams that also contain other strongly correlated states. Many systems of interest are therefore close to more than one instability, and tuning between the resultant ordered phases is the subject of intense research 1 . In recent years, uniaxial pressure applied using piezoelectric-based devices has been shown to be a particularly versatile new method of tuning 2,3 , leading to experiments that have advanced our understanding of the fascinating unconventional superconductor Sr 2 RuO 4 (refs.  4–9 ). Here we map out its phase diagram using high-precision measurements of the elastocaloric effect in what we believe to be the first such study including both the normal and the superconducting states. We observe a strong entropy quench on entering the superconducting state, in excellent agreement with a model calculation for pairing at the Van Hove point, and obtain a quantitative estimate of the entropy change associated with entry to a magnetic state that is observed in proximity to the superconductivity. The phase diagram is intriguing both for its similarity to those seen in other families of unconventional superconductors and for extra features unique, so far, to Sr 2 RuO 4 . 

   more » « less
3. Proximity-induced superconductivity generated by thin films: Effects of Fermi surface mismatch and disorder in the superconductor

   https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.106.085429  

   Stanescu, Tudor D.; Das Sarma, Sankar (August 2022, Physical Review B)

   We investigate the effects of disorder characterizing a superconducting thin film on the proximity-induced superconductivity generated by the film (in, e.g., a semiconductor) based on the exact numerical analysis of a three-dimensional microscopic model. To make the problem numerically tractable, we use a recursive Green’s function method in combination with a “patching approach” that exploits the short-range nature of the interface Green’s function in the presence of disorder. As a result of the Fermi surface mismatch between the superconductor (SC) and the semiconductor (SM) in combination with the confinement-induced quantization of the transverse SC modes, the proximity effect induced by a clean SC film is typically one to three orders of magnitude smaller that the corresponding quantity for a bulk SC and exhibits huge thickness-dependent variations. The presence of disorder has competing effects: on the one hand, it enhances the proximity-induced superconductivity and suppresses its strong thickness dependence, on the other hand, it generates proximity-induced effective disorder in the SM. The effect of proximity-induced disorder on the topological superconducting phase and the associated Majorana modes is studied nonperturbatively. 

   more » « less
4. Magnetic-field-sensitive charge density waves in the superconductor UTe2

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06005-8  

   Aishwarya, Anuva; May-Mann, Julian; Raghavan, Arjun; Nie, Laimei; Romanelli, Marisa; Ran, Sheng; Saha, Shanta R.; Paglione, Johnpierre; Butch, Nicholas P.; Fradkin, Eduardo; et al (June 2023, Nature)

   The intense interest in triplet superconductivity partly stems from theoretical predictions of exotic excitations such as non-Abelian Majorana modes, chiral supercurrents and half-quantum vortices1–4. However, fundamentally new and unexpected states may emerge when triplet superconductivity appears in a strongly correlated system. Here we use scanning tunnelling microscopy to reveal an unusual charge-density-wave (CDW) order in the heavy-fermion triplet superconductor UTe2 (refs. 5–8). Our high-resolution maps reveal a multi-component incommensurate CDW whose intensity gets weaker with increasing field, with the CDW eventually disappearing at the superconducting critical field Hc2. To understand the phenomenology of this unusual CDW, we construct a Ginzburg–Landau theory for a uniform triplet superconductor coexisting with three triplet pair-density-wave states. This theory gives rise to daughter CDWs that would be sensitive to magnetic field owing to their origin in a pair-density-wave state and provides a possible explanation for our data. Our discovery of a CDW state that is sensitive to magnetic fields and strongly intertwined with superconductivity provides important information for understanding the order parameters of UTe2. 

   more » « less
5. Pairing symmetry and fermion projective symmetry groups

   https://doi.org/10.21468/SciPostPhys.17.6.161  

   Yang, Xu; Biswas, Sayak; Lu, Shuangyuan; Randeria, Mohit; Lu, Yuan-Ming (January 2024, SciPost Physics)

   The Ginzburg-Landau (GL) theory is very successful in describing the pairing symmetry, a fundamental characterization of the broken symmetries in a paired superfluid or superconductor. However, GL theory does not describe fermionic excitations such as Bogoliubov quasiparticles or Andreev bound states that are directly related to topological properties of the superconductor. In this work, we show that the symmetries of the fermionic excitations are captured by a Projective Symmetry Group (PSG), which is a group extension of the bosonic symmetry group in the superconducting state. We further establish a correspondence between the pairing symmetry and the fermion PSG. When the normal and superconducting states share the same spin rotational symmetry, there is a simpler correspondence between the pairing symmetry and the fermion PSG, which we enumerate for all 32 crystalline point groups. We also discuss the general framework for computing PSGs when the spin rotational symmetry is spontaneously broken in the superconducting state. This PSG formalism leads to experimental consequences, and as an example, we show how a given pairing symmetry dictates the classification of topological superconductivity. 

   more » « less