Via
Physics Today:
Exotic superconducting state lurks at an astonishingly high magnetic field
by
Johanna L. Miller
Although far from theoretically understood, uranium telluride’s unusual properties could be the hallmark of a new phase of electronic matter.
Superconductivity and magnetism don’t usually mix. When a superconductor is placed in a magnetic field, it expels the field from its bulk through the Meissner effect; a strong enough field destroys the superconducting state entirely. In the vast majority of superconductors, electrons form spin-singlet pairs, with s– or d-wave symmetry, that are twisted apart by the field.
Even the rare p-wave, spin-triplet superconductors (such as strontium
ruthenate; see
Physics Today, December 2006, page 23) are limited in how
strong a magnetic field they can tolerate.
Last year the list of unusual superconductors grew by one, when
Nicholas Butch and colleagues at NIST and the University of Maryland discovered spin-triplet superconductivity in uranium telluride, or UTe2. (The
paper
reporting their results, although submitted in October 2018, wasn’t
published until this August; in the intervening time, the discovery was
confirmed by a team of researchers at Tohoku University in Japan and Grenoble Alps University in France.)...
