Check out NIST's Taking Measure: Just a Standard Blog where QMC researcher Dr. Sheng Ran's details the surprizes uncovered during the discovery of the spin-triplet superconductivity in UTe2.
A collaboration between QMC, NIST and the National High Magnetic Field Lab (NHMFL) has produced evidence for a rare phenomenon called re-entrant superconductivity in the material uranium ditelluride, a nearly ferromagnetic superconductor recently discovered in the Center. The team used the facilities of NHMFLto expose UTe2 samples to ultra-high magnetic fields as high as 65 Teslas as a function of field strength, angle orientation and temperature, uncovering yet another superconducting phase that is destroyed and then revived as a function of magnetic field. It was a record-busting performance for a superconductor and marked the first time two field-induced superconducting phases have been found in the same compound. The work is now published in Nature Physics, and reviewed here.
QMC is hosting a one-day symposium focusing on quantum materials research, bringing together researchers from the Departments of Physics, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Materials Science and Engineering at UMD, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Laboratory for Physical Sciences.
The symposium is on Thursday, Sept. 26, 2019 at the University of Maryland in the Kim Engineering Building (see agenda here).
A collaboration between the NIST Center for Neutron Research and QMC has led to a novel discovery of a new spin-triplet superconducting phase in the actinide compound UTe2. Discovered by postdoctoral researcher Sheng Ran, this novel state exhibits striking features that are unmatched in any known superconductors, including an unprecedentedly strong resistance to magnetic fields and evidence for Cooper pairs of electrons with an aligned spin state, called spin-triplet pairing. Because such superconductors potentially harbor a non-trivial topology of their pairing wavefunction, UTe2 is likely to be a topological superconductor, which is both rare and extremely promising for quantum technologies. This work is published in Science.