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Superconductivity

Finding a direction

The experimental observation of superconductivity that breaks spin-rotation symmetry in copper-doped Bi2Se3 provides a qualitatively distinct kind of unconventional superconducting behaviour — one that brings the importance of the spin–orbit interaction to the fore.

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Figure 1: Pictorial representation of spin-triplet Cooper pairs in the superconductor CuxBi2Se3, with zero total spin projection along a particular direction (that is, the vertical axis) in the lattice plane.

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Correspondence to Liang Fu.

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Fu, L. Finding a direction. Nature Phys 12, 822–823 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3793

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