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QUANTUM MATERIALS

A magnetic field boost for superconductors

Nature Physics volume 15, pages 1211–1212 (2019)Cite this article

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High-magnetic-field experiments on the recently discovered unconventional superconductor UTe2 are consistent with p-wave pairing arising while time-reversal symmetry is broken. In turn, this suggests that this material is a candidate for a chiral superconductor that may be exploited for topological quantum computing.

The intimate interplay between magnetism and superconductivity can be explored by increasing the magnetic field applied on a superconducting state. For type-I superconductors, superconductivity is instantaneously destroyed above a critical field value Hc. In contrast, for type-II superconductors, magnetic vortices form above a lower critical field Hc1, and only at a substantially higher upper critical field Hc2 does the superconducting state break down completely. Moreover, for high-temperature type-II superconductors, it is also widely believed that strong magnetic quantum fluctuations arising in the vicinity of a magnetic quantum instability that marks the destruction of the magnetically ordered state provide the ‘glue’ required to form superconducting Cooper pairs1.

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Fig. 1: The unusual magnetic field versus angle phase diagram for orthorhombic UTe2 that shows three superconducting phases surviving fields exceeding 65 T reported by Ran and colleagues.
Fig. 2: Topological quantum computing relies on the fact that in two dimensions the exchange of two indistinguishable particles may trigger a change of state for the underlying quantum system.

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  1. Laboratory for Neutron and Muon Instrumentation, Paul Scherrer Institute, Villigen, Switzerland

    Marc Janoschek

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  1. Marc Janoschek
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Correspondence to Marc Janoschek.

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Janoschek, M. A magnetic field boost for superconductors. Nat. Phys. 15, 1211–1212 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-019-0731-1

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