Novel superconducting materials
||Novel superconducting materials|
||Egor Babaev <email@example.com>|
||2014-01-01 – 2015-01-01|
Of central interest today are iron based superconductors which have high critical temperatures and high potential for technological applications. These systems are "multicomponent" i.e. cannot be described in a standard way using only one kind of superconducting component. As a consequence of having several type of carriers responsive for superconductivity, these materials behave fundamentally different from traditional superconductors from the viewpoint of transport and magnetic properties. This superconducting state requires theoretical understanding from the fundamental viewpoint and also in order to use such materials in practical applications. For example all the transport properties of superconductors crucially depend on behavior of magnetic vortices and other topological defects in these materials. High critical currents in currently existing commercial superconducting transmission lines are current limiters is only achieved by controlling vortex motion in these materials. The magnetic response, transport properties and dynamics of vortex excitations in newly discovered multicomponent superconductor is still poorly understood.
In particular these superconductors can break the fundamental classification according to type-1/type-2 dichotomy. These fundamental properties remains an outstanding open question, which we plan to address in the project.
Another open fundamental questions: what is the nature of superconducting state in these materials? How can it be probed in experiments and distinguished from other superconducting states?